


An Unwritten Life

by GlassParade



Category: Glee
Genre: M/M, Out With A Bang Big Bang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 21:55:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 45,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4322184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlassParade/pseuds/GlassParade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An adaptation of the movie "The Brothers Bloom" – Blaine and Cooper are brothers and con artists, committing crimes worldwide with explosives expert Santana in tow. But Blaine wants out of the life, while Cooper wants to pull off one last con – and for his mark, he's selected reclusive automotive heir Kurt Hummel. With Coop's promise to finally let him go in hand, Blaine sets the hook and reels Kurt into a madcap global adventure in lies, violence, death...and love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

>   
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> Art by [Rocketssurgery](http://rocketssurgery.tumblr.com)  
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I don't remember exactly _when_ I started to get tired of Cooper's schemes. Long before we pulled off our last real family con, I know that. But that particular con was definitely the last straw.

Flames licked at my back that night – controlled lines of fire courtesy of Santana's expert pyrotechnics – smoke carrying the smell of burning sheet music pages to my nose and out of the broken window to my left. And before me stood fading actor Jesse St. James, gun in his trembling hand, panic in his eyes.

If I were ten, or even only five years younger, I'd be worried that this wasn't going to come off the way it was supposed to. But now, after a lifetime of Cooper's plans and ideas, I was just tired.

Still, I had a part to play. "Don't you see, Jesse?" I asked, being sure to inject exactly the right amount of hope and bravado into the question. "He gets the antique puzzle box, you get the money, and I get the girl. In the end, everyone can win!"

Cooper's entire plan, all the months of work, they all led up to this and hinged on what Jesse St. James would choose to do in the next moment. His hair was standing on end, scraps and specks of charred paper sticking to the less-than-expertly-tousled chestnut waves. Wildness shone in his eyes. His suit, so pristine hours before, was in rags, the result of ransacking and pillaging his own home in search of half a million dollars I had allegedly hidden in one of the many rooms.

He was the very portrait of insanity. And if I had done my job right, my words would push him over the edge.

"Screw you," Jesse choked out, and pulled the trigger.

***

What you need to know about Cooper and I in order to follow this story isn't much. My name is Blaine – at least it is as far as you're concerned. Cooper is my brother, my for-real actual older brother. We've been inseparable since we were kids in a New York orphanage together and confidence men as far back as I can remember.

We've come a long way since conning our fellow orphans out of their Rocket Pops.

It wasn't an easy childhood. Cooper's schemes got us bounced from one foster home to another as often as they guaranteed we'd be placed together. When we were teenagers we removed ourselves from the system and struck out alone.

Well. Not alone. We had each other. Cooper and Blaine. Blaine and Cooper. We didn't have much starting out, but as long as we had each other, we had more than most. I was happy to follow in his footsteps, to follow instructions and scripts.

Was, of course, being the operative word.

***

The bullet hit me in the chest with the force of a speeding train and sent me crumpling to the floor. I felt the blood begin to flow, staining my crisp white shirt with indelible bright crimson. My head felt like it was spinning from the impact, my vision blurring over so that I could only just make out Cooper sprinting to my side, shoving Jesse out of the way and making him stumble. "What the shit did you do, St. James?" he barked, hands running over my chest, his thumb snagging in the hole left by the bullet. "This asshole was the only one who knew where the money was hidden!"

Jesse's laugh was dry as the acrid smoke, edged with hysteria. He pushed a clump of sweat-damp brown hair back from his forehead. "The Jesse St. James you met in a West End dive bar five months and a thousand years ago doesn't exist," he managed to get out around a gale of mad giggles. I had to strain to hear him; the gunshot had all but deafened me, I could almost only hear ringing. "To hell with you. To hell with the money." I heard the gun clatter to the floor. "Let it rot."

His footsteps shuffled out of the room, receding into the distance until all I could make out were echoes as he clattered into the courtyard, and then the engine of his Porsche fired up and carried him away into the night. "He's gone," Cooper announced unnecessarily.

My entire abdomen felt like the cast of Riverdance had done an encore on it. It took effort to sit up and pull my wet, red shirt front open. "I liked this shirt," I mumbled to my brother as I pulled the punctured cackle bladder that had held the fake blood away from the bulletproof vest that had kept me from being murdered outright by a faded Broadway C-lister.

"I'll buy you a new one." Cooper hauled me to my feet. "How you feeling, little bro?"

I spat a mouthful of fake blood onto the floor. "Tastes like tin foil."

"So does real blood." His face was split into a huge grin, and no wonder. This con with St. James was our biggest haul yet, and it had gone exactly and precisely according to plan. It couldn't have been more perfect. "You did great."

"Great." I knew I sounded listless, and I didn't care. I was beyond done. My hand shook with exhaustion as I reached up and undid my bowtie, letting it hang loose from my collar. Catching a glimpse of myself in a blackened mirror, I saw I looked like hell. I still didn't care.

Santana strolled in, lighting one of her Sobranies with the acetylene torch she kept with her like a kid's favorite stuffed toy. "Wrap party," she announced, terse as ever. Santana treated speaking like she did nitroglycerin – only ever using as much as she needed to get a job done and keeping the rest well protected. Pushing the deep hood of her voluminous red coat back on her head so that her heavily honey-streaked black hair fell free around her shoulders, she spun on her spike-heeled foot and stalked back out the way she'd come, footsteps clacking rhythmically out to the courtyard.

***

"It's not you, it's me, Jesse," Rachel Berry had told him a year ago, standing in front of the bookcase that burned behind me now. "This is the end. I want to be with Finn."

Don’t worry. I’m not going to go into the entire boring backstory of what Cooper and I did to Jesse St. James. It’s not important – except for one thing.

The only thing that is important is that you know what made Jesse pull that trigger and shoot me, because in that simple motive you find out everything there is to know about my brother’s peculiar genius in cons: simply put, he wanted to up the odds that Jesse would shoot me. Yes, on purpose.

With care, he’d dressed me in a black and white suit that was the masculine version of the one that Jesse’s wife Rachel – who somehow was essentially a female version of myself – had worn. His script had directed me to stand in the exact spot in the library where she’d given Jesse the big kiss-off. In a final particularly inspired touch, Cooper had phonetically matched my script to her last words. No, he did. Try it out for yourself.

He’s brilliant, right?

Anyway. How did we know all of those things, is what you’re asking, I’m sure, and the answer is simple. Because this is what Cooper does. Cooper is the plan man, the information extractor. No personal detail is too small, no piece of information too insignificant to be used against you. A few bottles of whiskey a week over a few months and Jesse was all but putting on a Broadway show of his life story. It all played right into Cooper’s hands.

See, Cooper entertained dreams once of being an actor and a screenwriter, and if I’m being honest, I don’t think that has ever really left him. My brother writes cons like dead Russians write novels – with overarching themes and plots, perfectly placed details and, as a finishing touch, elegant violence choreographed like a ballet and executed mostly by Santana...

All of it ushered and guided by me, the narrator, the man who leads the story where it needs to go. That's my job, it always has been. Cooper writes the story. Blaine follows the script. Santana blows things up. We've got it down to a science now.

Here’s the thing: I never really did like science.

***

"Half a million split three ways," Cooper gloated to the early evening sky outside of the decimated St. James mansion, running a hand over the his thick dark hair. His blue eyes narrowed as he glanced over at me standing by our procured Bentley. "Try not to look so excited, Blaine. Geez."

My open shirt was drying stiff in the warm summer air. I shrugged it off and reached to pull a fresh button down out of my bag in the car. "The problem with fake blood," I mused as I slipped my arms into the clean cotton sleeves, "is that it never changes color when it dries, it just stays red. You know? If someone ever stuck around long enough after shooting me one day, the whole thing would go up in smoke."

"Like St. James' priceless collection of original Broadway scripts?" Cooper cracked. When I didn't laugh at his joke, he sighed, pulling a deck of cards from his pocket and starting to shuffle them. "Come on, Blaine. Are we doing this again?"

"Cooper -"

He kept shuffling, swinging into a long lope and pacing the drive. "Same thing after every job for the last year. This is where you say -"

"I'm out, Cooper."

"And I say, come on, Blaine. Be serious.” He cut the deck of cards and held it up, silently asking if he’d drawn the card I was thinking of. “Then you say -"

The card was a two of diamonds. I sighed and shook my head. "I really mean it this time, Cooper. This is it. I'm out."

He shoved the cards back into his pocket and pulled a pack of Marlboros and a silver Zippo out, offering them to me with a courtesy most people didn't get to see. I shook my head and he went on, mumbling around the butt of the cigarette he quickly stuck between his lips. "It's a good life, Blaine. Right? You know I try to take care of you."

"I'm thirty years old, Cooper." With extra care to hide the trembling of my nervous hands, the shortness of my shallow breaths, I folded the bloodstained shirt and placed it neatly on top of the bulletproof vest sitting on the beige leather seat. "I'm tired of this. Of running, of being shot, of ruining clothes. I'm tired of charming women into thinking I _might_ sleep with them if they give me the right information." I paused. "I'm tired of _actually_ sleeping with strange men who think they know me."

"They don't have to know _you_ , they just have to _like_ you," my brother argued. "Those guys you see, they're just for a night anyway, they get the job done for you and that's all anybody needs, right?"

"They don't even like _me_ , Cooper!" The words exploded out of me with more force than I'd intended, but I had discovered that it was hard to control years of pent-up frustration. Cooper _liked_ being rootless, unattached to any one girl for more than a few hours. He'd never really understood that it was different for me, that I wanted more, that I wanted something real. "They like whoever you say I am! And maybe that's enough for you but..." I took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of burnt paper and rambling jacaranda, letting it settle into my lungs and steady my soul. "It's not for me. Not anymore."

It got so quiet between us, all I heard was the crackle of his cigarette burning down and a few crickets. "What are you telling me, Blaine?"

"That I'm done. Really done this time." Hearing the words in my own voice for the first time, with all the conviction I'd never managed before, sent a thrill of anticipation through my stomach. "I want to take care of myself. Hell, I want to find out who I am when you aren't writing me a personality! I want to have a life, Cooper."

"You have a life!"

"I want an _unwritten_ life." This was the important thing, the one point I had to make that I didn't know how to make him understand. "One that's mine, one that I call the shots for."

He leveled a stare on me that, once upon a time, would have sent me shrinking back and falling into my assigned role once more. "I love you, Squirt." A cloud of smoke wound its way out of his mouth to mingle with the wisps still coming from the mansion even as Santana was going around putting out her little fires. "But come on, would you even know how?"

That stung. I knew he was just trying to get at me, but it stung. Wanting to conceal how close to home the jibe had hit, I glanced down to check my trousers. A little dusty and smelling like smoke, but they'd do. Miraculously, none of the fake blood in the cackle bladder had leaked on them this time.

I needed to get out of here before he talked me into staying. Again.

Reaching down under the front passenger seat of the Bentley, I tugged out the packet of Jesse's money that had been meant for me. Along with my investments and other funds obtained via Cooper's schemes, I figured I had more than enough to live on while I worked out...well. How to live, I supposed. I unwrapped the brick of bills and began to insert small stacks of money into hidden pockets inside the lining of my bag. "I won't know unless I try."

I guess I'd caught him off guard, because he was really staring at me now, cigarette gone and card deck back in his hands. "You really mean this."

"I really do." I closed up the top of the bag and hauled it out of the Bentley. "See you, Cooper." A little unsentimental, but night was falling and I wanted to get out to the road while I could still see to hitchhike.

His hands stilled in the act of shuffling the deck. "Santana'll be out any minute. Let us drop you at the airport." He cut the deck and held it up. Queen of clubs. I shook my head again, and he chuckled. “One day, I’ll get this right, and it’ll be the greatest card trick in the world.” He tilted his head. “Come on, Blaine. Let us give you a ride.”

The nearest airport was an hour and a half away. An hour and a half would be long enough for him to talk me out of this. Not that I was actually going to the nearest airport, or even the next nearest. I'd learned a few tricks of my own about disappearing. There were other bigger, more major airports within a few hours of Martha's VIneyard. "No."

"Blaine..."

Hoisting the bag over my shoulder, I headed for the gates of the estate, my steps crunching over the pebbled drive. I didn't dare look back at Cooper. I could feel his eyes boring with incredulity into my back and I couldn't look at him. If I looked back, I would go back. My grip around my bag's strap tightened. "Tell Santana I said goodbye. And not to try to find me."

I picked up my pace so that Cooper had to shout. "You're not even gonna go to the wrap party?"

Nope.

No more stories. No more scripts. Just my own life.

I hoped I liked it.


	2. Chapter 2

Of course, it's never that easy.

The bamboo rings holding the mosquito netting around my bed rattled as it was pulled open. Having lost even that frail gauze filter, I had to squint as the Caribbean sun flooded into my eyes. "What the hell?"

"Breakfast," Cooper replied, vanishing out the door of my cabin.

It was three months since the St. James job. Clearly my brother been spending that quality time taking lessons in being taciturn and enigmatic from Santana.

I swung out of bed and hitched my suspenders up over my shoulders, yawning as I shuffled across the floor boards. I wasn't sure I was up for this. I'd spent the night before enjoying the company of an American tourist – blond, football player, body like a washboard and a mouth like a Hoover. Sweet, though, sweet and considerate and discreet. He'd made a quiet exit an hour or two before Cooper showed up. _Sam_ , he’d said his name was. I’d liked him.

Too bad I could pretty much bank on never seeing him again, even though he’d mentioned he was here for another week. I sighed and rubbed my hand over my chin, taking stock of my stubble and my mind. Neither was promising – I was down to shaving once a week, and my brain felt like it was swimming in sun-warmed honey.

I'd hardly gotten any sleep, in the end, and that was bad. I knew my brother. He wasn't here because he missed me. He wanted something, and I did not have my wits about me. This had trouble written _all_ over it. Ambling over to the sink, I turned on the water and got out my razor.

I was stalling. Of course I was stalling. Whatever Cooper wanted from me, it was bad enough that he wanted me at all, that he'd gone to the trouble of tracking me down, that he had completely disregarded my clearly stated wish to be left alone.

Who wanted to hurry towards that kind of trouble? Certainly not me.

I’d done half my face when Cooper poked his head back through the doorway, impatience all but vibrating off of him. “Move it, Blaine.”

“You’ll get me when you get me,” I shot back. “I didn’t invite you here.”

In the mirror, I saw him roll his eyes. “Fine.” With a huff, he disappeared, and I let out a breath I hadn’t even known I was holding.

I didn’t like that he was here. Not a single, solitary bit.

Cooper was gone by the time I was cleaned up and mostly awake enough to deal with him, but that didn’t mean much. He was just gone from my front porch. Mustique, my chosen home, was not a terribly large island, and sure enough I found him not ten minutes after I started walking. He had a Bloody Mary on the restaurant table in front of him and a shit-eating grin on his face.

Well. That was disarmingly familiar.

“Sit,” he invited. “It’s good to see you. Better without the whole face fungus thing. Bloody Mary?”

“Coffee.” I jerked my chin up at the waiter, who knew my coffee order by heart at this point. “It’s too early for alcohol.”

Cooper barked out a laugh and pushed his trilby back on his head. “Lighten up, Blaine. Bloody Marys are like breakfast drinks. Besides, it’s five o’clock somewhere.”

“Yeah, in Kiev.” I thought about running, but how pointless would that be on a two mile square island in the middle of the Caribbean? After the trouble Cooper had surely gone through in order to find me, a few more minutes of tracking would be a cakewalk. I pulled out the other chair and flung myself down into it, pretending a nonchalance I didn’t at all feel. “How’d you find me?”

“Santana.”

Damn it. “And how’d she find me?”

He snorted. “Please.”

He did have a point.

We sat for a long moment, just kind of staring at each other, taking the whole thing in. Three months was the longest we’d ever been separated since we were kids. But he hadn’t changed, not at all. Black trilby. Carefully styled thick black hair. Black trousers, shiny black patent brogues, black suspenders, white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, perpetual smirk on his face. It was the Cooper I’d known all my life.

I knew what he was seeing. Shaving job aside, I knew I was a rumpled mess in linen pants, a shirt that wasn’t tucked in all the way around, sand-encrusted boat shoes. I hadn’t taken a comb to my hair since I’d gotten here, and I _liked_ it this way. My whole life I’d had to be dapper and charming, polished and perfect for the parts Cooper wrote for me. Here on the island, though, I was just me, only Blaine. I knew the leisure suited me – couldn’t he _see_ that? Would he leave me alone if he could?

No such luck. “How’ve you been doing, Blaine?”

“I’m fine,” I replied, being sure to load the two words with as much pointed resentment as I could muster. My nod as I accepted the coffee the waiter brought me was equally pointed and short, and I had to wince at the rudeness – Cecil had done nothing to earn enmity from me, it wasn’t his fault that my brother’s visit had put me on edge. I resolved to tip him well, even more so than I usually did.

_Usually did_. And there was the crux of my unhappiness. I’d come to this seaside cafe at least once a day for the last three months. Established the habit, etched out a start of a life. The smell of the salt air had made a home in my nose. I _belonged_ here now, and I despised Cooper’s presence for the disruption it was already bringing.

Despised it even as I was, I had to admit, glad to see him. Giving in to the inevitable, I reached across the table for the sugar dispenser and jumped in with both feet, just like he’d always taught me. “You went to a lot of trouble to get here, so we might as well can the small talk. What do you want, Cooper?”

His smirk shifted into an open grin as he leaned forward, elbows on the table as he pushed his hat to the back of his head. “I love it when you’re feisty, Squirt.”  

The sugar wouldn’t come out of the dispenser no matter how I shook. Annoyed, I set it down and shoved it aside. Already things were going wrong just with him _being_ here! “Cooper...”

“All right, all right.” He pulled out the little Moleskine notebook, his omnipresent accessory and life’s blood. There must have been a hundred of the things locked away in safe deposit boxes all over the world, full of scripts and notes and plans for cons. I felt my heart sink into my boat shoes at the sight of this one now. It hit the table with a smack. “Listen. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last three months.”

“I can see that.” I didn’t bother to try and pick up the notebook. Quite apart from the fact that I wanted nothing to do with it, I’d learned early on that trying to touch The Book would get me smacked. “Now, I don’t usually question your choices, Cooper, but -”

“Well, I question yours plenty, and little brother, I think it’s a good thing.” Cooper grabbed the dispenser and tipped it upside down over his hand. Of course for him, a powdery white stream of crystals flooded out of the container and trickled between his fingers, the snowiness contrasting with the dark tan of his skin. “Listen, you don’t want out. You think you do, but you don’t.”

“I said I want out, Cooper. I don’t know how much more clear I can make it.”

“Nah.” He flipped the sugar dispenser upright and pushed it across the table to me. “Come on. I need to show you something.”

When I tipped the dispenser over my coffee cup, the lid that Cooper had loosened broke free and dumped every last grain of sugar into my cup. Of course. Of _course_. I always fell for it. Every goddamn time.

Cooper was on his feet and walking off. “You coming?”

I looked down at my full coffee cup, weariness overtaking me as I watched capillary action carry coffee up into the small sugary mountain, tinting it brown.

Even my coffee was a metaphor.

Fishing out my wallet, I tossed down money for Cecil and got up to follow Cooper. Because of course I was going to follow him. He’d already wrecked the tranquility of my life here, and if I said no, he’d just pester and pester and pester some more...

...and I missed him. There was that. “Where are we going?”

He didn’t turn around. “Ohio.”

I blinked. “Let me get my hat.”

***

There were trees _everywhere_. Trees and vines and bushes and so much green the landscape was alive with it. “Where are we?” I inquired, squinting up at where my brother and Santana were on a hill, busy hacking their way through some of the lower hanging branches.

“The largest private estate in the Midwest,” Cooper called back, holding a branch so that Santana could go at it with her machete. There was more than one reason I was standing well away from them. “Home of our final mark. Pop was an automotive genius, kind of like, what’s that guy you like?”

I sighed. It did not bode well for me when Cooper remembered my more obscure interests. “Carroll Shelby?”

“Yeah! Like that. Mom died when the kid was ten, nobody really knows of what. The family’s pretty reclusive and secretive and shit.” With his free hand, Cooper held a pair of binoculars up to his eyes. “So Widower Dad builds this crazy-ass house – ” The big, leafy branch Santana was hacking at came free, revealing, indeed, a ‘crazy-ass’ house. It couldn’t be a Frank Lloyd Wright, but whoever had designed it sure had a thing for ol’ Frank, that much was clear from the angles and generous use of windows. Had to be a pain to cool down in summer. “And he lives in it with his kid until a heart attack takes him out. Leaving our sucker all alone in this crazy house with a totally insane fortune and no idea what to do with it.”

Cooper’s grin at the mark’s misfortune was way too smug and off-putting for my comfort, but I had no time to think about it. The sound of a very loud, very large engine was roaring not far away, filling my head with static. “Are we near an airport -”

“Get down,” Cooper ordered, grabbing Santana’s non-machete hand and pelting down the hill with her to the large box hedge by which I was standing. He tossed the binoculars aside and collared me, dragging me down to hide behind the hedge.

Just in the nick of time, too. I peered out from around the hedge to see a bright cherry-red Ferrari – an Enzo, if my car skills were on point, and they usually were – go screaming up the paved driveway, its speed far exceeding any legal or safe limit. “What the hell?”

Cooper didn’t reply, just hauled Santana and me back up the hill to where a low retaining wall separated the wooded area from the manicured grounds of the estate. We watched in silence as the Enzo roared up the drive, hugging curves closer than I’d ever held anyone, and then it zoomed into the paved circle of the courtyard that lay in front of the house -

\- where it drove right into a stone planter, bringing bricks down atop the formerly pristine cherry-red hood. I winced in sympathy. That was a crying shame. The Enzo was a hell of a car.

The driver’s side door lifted and a tall, graceful figure unfolded itself out of the vehicle, pacing around to the back of the Enzo to survey the damage. _A man_ , _okay, good_. As much as I disliked seducing men as part of a con, even more did I dislike seducing women as part of one – since I never followed through with the women, it seemed somehow more dishonorable, less kind.

The man – _the mark,_ I reminded myself – was wrapped in layers against the slight early fall chill. More layers than I thought the weather required, really; he wore his clothing like armor. Tall leather boots polished to a high shine. Tight black jeans with what looked like safety pins laddered down the sides. A bright red Oxford shirt tucked into the jeans – how was there even room? those jeans were painted onto his long legs like a second skin and the shirt wasn’t any looser – and draped over his shoulders, a black cape that he swept open when he put his hands on his hips as he examined his car, allowing me an even better view of his outfit…and, okay, his body.

A black driving cap and the sunlight had been conspiring to obscure his face, but since Cooper had done the selecting and there was apparently a lot of money involved, I wasn’t expecting anything special. The most Cooper had ever done for me was to make sure anyone I had to seduce would be someone I could _believably_ seduce. I wasn’t, no matter what he ever told me, the best actor, and I had always struggled most of all with authenticity in the realm of the bedroom.

I returned my attention to the mark. The body was good, the clothing interesting, it was too much to hope for more.

That was when he swept the cap off, flopping his arms against his sides in a huff of irritation, and I saw everything.

“Get the car,” I croaked out, pushing Cooper aside to start picking my way down the hill. “We’re going.”

***

“Come on, Blaine.”

“No.”

“You don’t even -”

“I don’t need to!” I spun on my heel to face him for the first time on the long walk down to where Santana had parked our car. “I don’t need to know anything, I don’t need to see anything else, I just need to go. That’s how we work, Cooper. If one of us vetoes the con, it doesn’t happen.”

He’d been bugging me for ten minutes and he wasn’t about to let up, that much I could see. “What is it, Blaine? He not pretty enough for you?”

“It’s not that.” It definitely wasn’t that. Whoever this guy was, he was straight out of Michelangelo’s studio, his features were so perfectly sculpted. And it wasn’t plastic surgery, it wasn’t that kind of perfect, the too-done perfect. It was marble statue perfect, cut with precision by God himself, if there was a God. Sharp cheekbones, a high forehead, full lips, and possibly the world’s most adorable nose, of all things. His hair was thick and styled well, standing away to complement rather than obscure his face. He was, in point of fact, possibly the most beautiful human being I had ever seen, and I wanted him nowhere near mine and my brother’s sordid lifestyle. “It doesn’t matter. I’m going back to Mustique. There was still some rum left on the island that had my name on it.”

But when I headed to the car, Santana was already leaning on it. She used the tip of her machete to push the brim of her fedora back and let her blood-red lips curve up in a smile that absolutely said, _no way._ “Oh, come on,” I pleaded, but nothing doing. She crossed one long, tanned leg over the other, tossed her hair over her shoulder - she’d gone full blonde since I’d last seen her, and I was still getting used to it - and pressed her mini-skirted butt even harder against the door.

In frustration, I turned back to Cooper, only to see him gazing back up towards the back of the house with his binoculars. “There we go,” he announced to no one in particular. “Kurt Hummel. 31. Lived at home pretty much his entire life.”

With a roll of her eyes, Santana pulled a collapsible spyglass out of the pocket of her tight-fitting jacket – and here I thought she’d just been happy to see me – and shoved it into my hand, jerking her chin up towards the house.

I knew it was a bad idea. I didn’t want to look. If I looked, I was done for.

I opened up the little scope and put it to my eye.

The mark – _Kurt_ , now, I had to tell myself – was striding across the back lawn, an enormous chainsaw swinging at his side. He was even more perfectly beautiful in this closer look through the telescope lens. I could almost count each freckle dusted across his cheeks and I was seized by the sudden and ridiculous urge to press a kiss to every one.

His eyes were maddening though. I couldn’t tell if they were blue or green or grey, only that they were very light and seemed to change with every shift of the sunlight.

And his mouth. The things I wanted to do -

There was a line of thought that was pure treachery to follow. “An eccentric shut-in rich brat?” I asked Cooper, pulling the little spyglass away from my eye with extreme reluctance. “You’re not helping your case.”

“He’s bored, he’s like a, like a blank slate or something!” Cooper gestured towards the house. The sound of a chainsaw being ripped into noisy life echoed down to us. Cooper raised his chin and his voice. “We’re going to take him on an adventure, Blaine. Inject a little life into this existence of his.”

My eyes were back on Kurt, who was attacking an enormous pillar hedge with his chainsaw, leaves and twigs flying. He’d pulled on a pair of goggles to shield his eyes. I sighed in disappointment. “That’s your plan, Cooper?” I shook my head. “Your big plan is to lure me back in with this gorgeous eccentric, stir up old memories of camaraderie and redemption? That’s amateur hour, especially for you.”

Even as I said it, I was watching Kurt, watching as he shaped his hedge into a graceful orb on a long stem of green. And I could feel Cooper watching me.

“I’m not saying yes, but what’s the con?” I asked.

I knew he was grinning, because he knew he’d got me. “Simple stuff. We’re brothers, antiques dealers this time, and we’re taking a big ol’ luxury steamer to Italy…”

I watched Kurt carefully slice more of the hedge, forming the base of it into something resembling a large Grecian vase.

I was going to need a drink if I was going to hear the rest of this.

***

_Midwestern corner bars._ I glanced dubiously up at the neon Pabst Blue Ribbon sign behind my brother’s head. That had been the only choice of beer in this dingy little bar, and Cooper was tucking into his third one with far too much delight, indulging in his role of the moment as Midwestern Lug #4. He’d even dug up a disgusting trucker’s cap for our little visit. “Well. It’ll all end in Mexico. Cozumel, maybe, or Tampico. One big burst of violence, then a moment of truth on the beach. What do you think?”

I looked down at the open Moleskine on the sticky bar between us and flicked my fingers at the rim of my glass of surprisingly decent whiskey. A chime pinged to accompany my dubious scowl. “I don’t buy it. You’ve got something else going. Something about me, somehow.”

Cooper’s sigh was rich with exasperation. “This might not be something you know, Blaine, but they’re _all_ about you.” He shuffled his deck of cards in his hands, held it up. A five of clubs. I shook my head.

He was shuffling the deck again when I said, “Yeah. Right.”

“I mean it.” And he did look disturbingly earnest as he cut the deck and showed me a jack of diamonds. Wrong again. He shrugged. “All of them. And maybe that’s why none of them have worked out, none of them have been perfect. In the end, I’ve never been able to give you what you want.”

The bar stool was uncomfortable under my backside and creaked as I shifted my weight. “Well, I want out of all this, Coop. So, by definition, this is not going to give me what I want.”

Cooper just stared at me, eyes steady yet bright. He held up his arm, shook it. An ace of spades fell out of the cuff.

His only answer, I knew. I looked down at the Moleskine again, at the first square in his flowchart. _Blaine meets Kurt._ “This is it. The last one. Then you’ll let me go?”

Cooper grinned, and despite my misgivings – despite my complete lack of trust in his far too glib, far too ready explanation – I grinned back. He turned to Santana, who had wandered over from the pool table, cue stick in hand. Her victim was standing still at the table, empty wallet open in his hand, and his eyes firmly fixed on her backside. I wondered if he even knew he’d been fleeced.

"Hey, 'Tana," Cooper said. "Make it a Schwinn."


	3. Chapter 3

"There are less painful ways of getting to a mark," I called over my shoulder as I wrestled irritably with the goggles that would protect my eyes from any potential flying glass.

Cooper, as ever, was choosing to ignore my protests. "The score to beat is 7.9," he called back, handing Santana a stack of numbered placards. "And keep your head in it. The Cuban judge is a hard-ass."

That reminded me. "Any particular reason you picked a banana seat, Santana?" The hill I was scheduled to roll down looked a little too bumpy for my genital comfort when you put them near the extended bicycle seat. Santana had always thought testicular trauma was hilarious.

At least the Schwinn wasn't pink on top of the banana seat. She also thought it was funny to poke fun at the fact that I took longer to get ready in the mornings than she did.

At the top of the hill, Santana batted her eyelashes at me and affected an innocent expression as she accepted a Corona from my brother. "Oh, don't give me that act," I snapped. "You _know_ what a freakin' banana seat is."

"Cut it, little brother," Cooper warned. "Here comes your boy."

"He's not my boy -" but I cut myself off. No point in finishing the sentence, they'd both just smirk at me and anyway, Cooper was right. The monster howl of Kurt Hummel's newly repaired Enzo was filling the air as he screamed up the highway leading to his home, and at the speed he was going, I was going to have to really work to get down the hill in time.

Most folks probably wouldn't understand what's going on here at first glance. But it's simple, really, one of the most basic cons in the world. And beautiful in its versatility as well. It can be a standalone con, it can work as the opening of a con, it can be the final insult at the end of a long money-draining scheme.

In its capacity as the opening gambit of a con, it's most effective. See, the most sure-fire way we've ever found to fast-track your way into a mark's sympathies is to have your first conversation with them be from a hospital bed they put you into. Hence me, the bike, and a swiftly approaching Ferrari. Get it?

There's a knack to it, of course. I mean, you don't want them to kill you, and a coma is both expensive and inconvenient. But it can't be too easy, either, you can't come out of this with a sprained ankle and expect anything. No, you really have to commit to a reasonably debilitating injury.

With my small, light frame and a hard-won tumbling ability, I'm usually able to parlay my efforts into a neatly dislocated shoulder. Add on to that what Cooper calls my "Wounded Orphan Puppy" eyes - the only advantage, I thought, to having large hazel eyes framed in ridiculously thick lashes - and it must be admitted, I'm pretty much guaranteed to melt your heart.

Honestly, it's not the people in the dark alley you should _really_ fear. I'm just saying.

I pushed off and began the rocky downhill descent to the road, lifting my ass off the damn banana seat just enough to get my testicles out of the most immediate danger. It was a harder job, as usual, forcing myself to stay relaxed in preparation for impact. You actually get injured worse if you brace yourself, see.

I knew from hiking up the hill that it wasn’t a long ride, but time seemed to slow as I bumped and rattled over the terrain, watching the road come up like a slowly unfurling ribbon. From the corner of my eye, I could see the Enzo bombing it up the road.

A fleeting worry that I hadn't timed things just right flashed through my mind about a second before I crashed over the last stretch of hill onto the road and my front wheel made contact with the front fender of the Ferrari.

Time stopped, but I didn’t.

I’d hit a little harder than I should have – in my distraction, I hadn’t really adjusted for the increased velocity of my downhill careening. The Schwinn skidded out from under me, spokes pronging out in all directions and the tire frame hopelessly bent. And I of course went flying over the hood of the car, catching a glimpse of Kurt’s face up close for the first time.

He was still absolutely gorgeous, even taking into account his blue eyes stretched wide in horror as they tracked my journey, and his mouth open in a hoarse yell I could hear even over the ferocious engine. A rakish, furry Russian army cap was tilted at a jaunty angle over his completely blood-drained face.

Anyone who is that appealing when they’re completely terrified out of their wits is a special person indeed. I know that sounds odd but...well. I guess you had to be there.

Time restarted with a bump as I crashed into the ground and rolled immediately off of the shoulder I knew I’d dislocated. Kurt sped forward a few more feet and screeched to a stop, the engine of his ridiculous car going from a howling roar to an almost purring idle in seconds. It was going to take him a few minutes to gather himself to come check on me – it always takes the mark time to deal with racing hearts and knuckles that won’t come unglued from the steering wheel – so I glanced up the hill I’d just rocketed down, squinting through my goggles until I found Santana and Cooper holding up their stupid score placards.

Cooper had accorded me an 8.9. More than respectable.

Santana’s smirk didn’t bode well, however. And sure enough, when she pulled the cards apart – 5.6.

“Oh, come on,” I grumbled, sitting up to rub at my aching shoulder. Even through the extra padding in my jacket, I could tell this one was going to be a bad one, and I cursed myself for allowing the thought of Kurt to distract me from my job in conning...well...Kurt. Oh, never mind.

Nearby, the growl of the Enzo’s engine caught my attention and I glanced over to watch the car lurch forward a few more feet before screeching to a stop again. Lurch, and stop. Lurch, skid a little to the right towards the hill, and stop.

Confused, I looked back up at my brother and Santana, but they looked as puzzled as I felt. Cooper held up his placards in a wide shrug and jerked his head towards the car.

Oh, sure. I was going to approach a sporadically moving vehicle with my right shoulder hanging out of the socket. Yeah. Sometimes I wondered if it was him giving _me_ too much credit, or the other way around.

Kurt’s car lurched forward one more time, backed up – and boy did I scramble to scoot back then, heedless of the asphalt tearing little holes into my pants and embedding pebbles into my skin. But the car only went a short distance towards me before finally jerking off to the _left_ , towards an embankment that led _down_ another hill.

My heart in my throat, I prayed for Kurt to put the brakes on – my shoulder mattered nothing now – and watched in horror as the exact opposite happened.

The Enzo went screeching over the embankment, snapping saplings and inadequate fencing as it bumped and rattled and crashed to a halt somewhere down below. My fingers were digging through the padded jacket and into my injured shoulder and it hurt like hell, but I didn’t care. I’d possibly just _killed_ Kurt Hummel.

Damn it, I _knew_ I should never, ever have agreed to this.

Up on the hill, I could see Cooper’s mouth dropped open in shock. But Santana raised her placards again.

7.9.

I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream for help.

In the end, I settled for all three.

***

“You know, maybe this is like, a blessing in disguise.”

Even given his usual insensitivity, that was an asshole thing for Cooper to say. “You’re kind of a jerk, Cooper, you know that, right?”

“Hear me out.” He had to reach out to keep me from darting away from him and back into the hospital room where Kurt had been out cold for the last hour and a half. “We’ve never tried it from this angle before. Maybe it’s a good omen that we’re going in fresh, right?”

Reaching, even for him. “How could you possibly not have found out ahead of time that he has asthma? I mean, seriously, Cooper, given the stunt we were pulling, we could have killed him by triggering that attack! We almost did!” Part of me strongly wanted to hit him, or maybe just smoke one of Santana’s harsh little French cigarettes, anything to try and drain out the angry adrenaline still bubbling around in my veins. “Jesus.”

“Yeah, well, we couldn’t even find out what killed his mom, Blaine. I told you! These rich folks, they’re private as hell, and this kid hasn't been seen in public for _years_.” Cooper ruffled a hand over his hair and stuck a hand in the pocket of his purloined lab coat to look for the two-headed coin he played with when he was feeling an excess of energy. “Listen. This can still totally work with _him_ being the one in the bed. If there’s one thing you do better than looking pathetic, it’s the apology thing. Work it right and you’ll have _him_ apologizing to _you_ for wrecking up your bike. Just like the Budapest thing.”

“It’s nothing like Budapest,” I protested, watching him turn the big silvery fifty-cent piece over and over his knuckles. Damn, but my shoulder was killing me. I had no such distraction from my own excess energy with my arm in a sling. “Kovács was actually trying to kill me for real over that crap you pulled.”

“Same basic principle?” But when I didn’t so much as crack a smile, my brother sighed and gave up. “Come on, Blaine. The boat leaves the day after tomorrow. You can’t back out now, you might as well go in there and snow the guy.”

He had a point, but I still didn’t want to do it. I glanced over to Santana for help. No dice. She was busy making eyes at a pretty green-eyed nurse with honey blond hair and a smirk that rivaled Santana's own as she took in my partner's exaggerated idea of a Candy Striper's outfit.

How did anyone walk in heels that high?

"Later," Santana purred, and prowled over to the nurse – Fabray, it looked like her name tag said.

I gave up on her and turned back to my brother. "Come on, Cooper. This seems heartless even for you. He's a sick rich kid who gets his kicks racing his car and sculpting hedges. Maybe we should leave him to it."

"And maybe I should have left your mopey ass guzzling rum and fucking pretty boy Americans in Mustique, but we're here now, aren't we?" There was a hard blue glint I rarely saw directed at me in Cooper's eye, a warning. I recoiled back a step at the sight of it. "Come on, Blaine. I have a lot of excitement planned for all of us. Don't wreck it now just because you dug up your conscience and dusted it off."

“I don’t...I’m not...” But I had no good answer to that. I didn’t have a good feeling about any of this, but he had a point. We were already here. My arm was already back in place and hung up in a sling. Kurt was already unconscious in a hospital bed. If I turned and ran now, it was actually more of an asshole move than putting him there in the first place. Because it was all for nothing. “Ugh.”

Cooper gently slung his arm around my shoulders. “Just think, little bro. Play it right, and you’re gonna get to show this kid the world, and he’s gonna love you for it.”

“And then I’m going to break his heart. This is not really incentive.”

“But you’ll leave him with a treasure chest full of beautiful memories.” He spun me around and shoved me towards the room. “Move it, Blaine.”

What choice did I have at this point?

***

“The sedative ought to wear off in about thirty more minutes,” the doctor – the _real_ doctor, not my brother in a stolen lab jacket – informed me as I tried hard to focus on him. I was so tired. “Then he’s free to go.”

“Okay.” I’d perched myself in the one decent chair in the room, an actual recliner with a high back. Apparently it was for visitors who wanted to nap while their patients were sleeping off sedatives. I planned fully to take advantage of that. “Anything else I need to remember?”

“No. Mr. Hummel is in pretty good shape, his hat helped cushion his head from the worst the steering wheel could deliver. We only sedated him for the CAT scan, at his request.” Flipping his chart shut, the doctor headed for the door. “I think you got the more raw end of the deal.”

My shoulder _still_ ached, but I’d declined any painkillers stronger than Tylenol. I needed my wits about me for this next part of the con – the part that was basically going to involve me playing chauffeur, trapped in Santana’s rented ‘78 Caddy with the most beautiful man I’d ever seen for the long drive back to his massive estate. I had 45 minutes to make friends with him and get him to invite me inside for the main part of my job.

Still. Ow, really. Just ow. “Yeah, maybe.” I rolled my head towards the hospital bed as the doctor left, taking in Kurt’s peaceful, slumbering face.

Even with dark circles under his eyes, even in an unflattering hospital gown, even with his hair in complete disarray, Kurt Hummel still managed to take my breath away. I couldn’t see his distracting color-shifting eyes, but I could still let my gaze slip over lightly freckled cheekbones I wanted to let my fingertips drift over. I had no idea what his voice sounded like outside of his scream of terror, but his full, perfect lips still made me want to kiss him breathless. And his arms, extending out of the short sleeves of the hospital gown, they were as pale as milk but strong, muscles lean yet well-defined and making me wonder, as I drifted off to sleep, what it might feel like to be held in his embrace...

It felt like I’d only just gotten to sleep when a sharp poke at my good shoulder startled me awake again. “Hey.”

“Hey! Hello!” I jerked my head up from where it had drooped down nearly to my shoulder, painfully aware of a crick in my neck that nearly made me yelp with the ouch of it all – until my eyes met those of my awakener and I fell deep into a pool of green tinged azure.

Pale eyelids descended, covering the beautiful eyes in a blink as thick golden brown eyelashes fanned out over freckle-dusted cheeks. The man – _Kurt,_ I reminded myself as my heart struggled to start again – took a deep breath and opened those dazzling eyes back up, brushing a flop of sun-streaked chestnut hair out of his face. “Listen,” he began, and there was his voice at last, not a harsh scream but the tired ring of a bell, clear and high and unlike anything I’d ever heard before. “I think they took my car.”

“I vaguely remember that,” I mumbled back, recalling the flat-bed tow truck that had followed us off of the Hummel estate, the cherry-red Enzo perched sadly on its back. “Yeah, I think they did.”

Brushing his hair aside had revealed that while his hat may have protected him from extensive damage, there was still a visibly purpling lump on his high forehead. A pang of guilt shot through me at the wince Kurt made when his fingers touched it. _Damn Cooper!_ I wished he’d never brought me here...

“I need a ride home,” Kurt stated, catching my wandering attention again. “Can you...”

“Oh, yes, of course, yes.” Right. I did still have a job to do, no matter how my stomach twisted in guilt and lust. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Okay. I’m just...I’ll be...” His eyes were still a bit dazed and distant as he straightened up and aimed one graceful hand in a vague gesture towards the bathroom. “Yeah.” He turned and wandered away, gait slightly unsteady and the back of his hospital gown fluttering open with his steps.

 _Oh_.

My aching neck protested as I tilted my head to observe the smooth, pale curve of Kurt’s bare rear end, but I couldn’t even begin to care. If I wanted to touch his cheekbones and kiss his lips, even more did I want to lay my palm on his ass, to cup and squeeze it and feel the muscle definition. I wondered if he rode horses or did yoga to achieve the amazing shape. I wondered how fast it would redden up if someone gave it a playful slap, blood rushing to fill in a red handprint on that pale, pale skin...

God _damn_ it, Cooper. This con was going to be the most trouble I had ever gotten myself into, ever, and if we all lived, I was going to kill my brother for it.

***

Kurt...wasn’t much of a talker.

“So...” I watched out of the corner of my eye as he fiddled with the Cadillac’s passenger side mirror, adjusting it until I could see my profile reflected in it. He seemed content to watch my reflection rather than me as I tried desperately to make conversation. It was disconcerting. “You have a really nice car.”

“It’s okay.” He folded back his arm and rested his chin on it, staring into the mirror. “It runs. Or did.”

“I’m sure that mechanic will get it up and running again in no time.” I tried to keep my voice upbeat, reassuring, but I wasn’t used to talking to someone who basically refused to look directly at me. How was I supposed to charm someone who didn’t give a fuck? “It didn’t look like there was too much damage when they pulled it out.” I forced a light laugh. “I think it got off better than you and I did.”

Still confined to peripheral vision, I could see his jaw tighten as he pulled his _ushanka_ further down over the lump on his head. Not for the first time, I wondered at his choice in headgear. For someone as reclusive and quiet as Kurt Hummel seemed to be, he had an interestingly loud fashion voice. Today, he’d paired the furry cap with an all-black ensemble, including his cape and those boots that gave me very bad thoughts. This allowed his cap to be the showpiece of the outfit and made him look like a young and proud Russian czar. It was a good look for him, lump and all.

I was inclined to believe any look was a good look for him, though.

“I’m sorry to have startled you into an asthma attack,” I offered when he didn’t reply. “I didn’t...” Didn’t what? I was usually at least a little better at thinking on my feet than this. I couldn’t say _I didn’t know you had asthma_ because that would let him know he was expected, that I’d meant to run into him, just not to scare him so badly. I couldn’t say _I didn’t hear you coming_ because who besides the hearing impaired wouldn’t have heard the Enzo coming a mile away?

I felt like an idiot.

Beside me, Kurt heaved an impatient sigh, his ocean gaze still focused on the mirror. “I know. You didn’t know I would get distracted and turn around in my seat to get my inhaler and accidentally move my foot from the brake to the gas and freak out and drive off the embankment.”

Oh. So that was what had happened. “Uh, yeah. I guess.”

“Whatever. I should have put the car into park.” He closed his eyes. “Sorry about your bike.”

“That old thing, it’s fine. I’m too old to be running around on bicycles anyway.” I was fighting again to keep the lightness in my voice, to try and jolly him along into a continuous conversation that was a bit less like pulling teeth. Never minding the con, I wanted to hear more of his melodious voice. Even his short, clipped sentences sounded like music. “I’ll give up cycling, it’s hard on my shoulder.” No lie, that. I'd had to take off my sling in order to operate the stick shift, and my shoulder wasn't shy about letting me know it didn't like that.

“Up to you, I guess.” With a shrug of his caped shoulder, Kurt lapsed into silence and turned his eyes away from the mirror, staring at nothing as we began the ascent up his spiraling driveway to the estate.

I gave up. This one was a nut I just couldn’t crack. Maybe if I could get into the house with him I could make conversation about the decorating – I was sure it had to be interesting – or the weather or something, _anything_ I could lead around to travel and excitement and adventure.

Failure wasn't an option. Not if I wanted my brother to let me go at last.

I pulled up into the cobbled courtyard and parked carefully next to the destroyed planter. "We're here."

"Yes." Kurt released himself from the seatbelt and pushed the Caddy's door open, stepping out onto the cobblestones with a click. A frown creased his face as he brushed his hands over his jacket and trousers, swiping away dust and wrinkles I couldn't even see.

I leaned across the seat. "Would you like me to help you inside?"

"I'm perfectly fine," came the snapped reply. Then – a sigh, and he leaned down into the car to look at me, pinning me in place with his gaze. "You could come in for coffee. If you want."

 _Try not to sound so excited,_ I grumbled internally. Honestly, if he hadn't been so mesmerizing and if I didn't have a job to try to do, I'd have dumped him at the gates of his estate, made him walk, and called it a day. _What a pill._

But he was so very attractive and I did so want to get back to my island life, so all I said was, "Sure," and I followed him through the huge wooden doors of his home.

 


	4. Chapter 4

I saw immediately that I had been right about the decorating. Sure, someone had had a pretty heavy hand with the antiques and the Tudor architecture at some point, but it was easy to spot where Kurt had laid his touches. Quirky tribal masks lined the walls of the foyer. Slender, undulating metal sculptures stood on delicate tables, looking for all the world as if they'd been frozen in the act of being poured. The heavy ceiling beams had all been swagged with sheer white material that offset their ponderous presence.

It shouldn't have worked at all, but like Kurt's fashion sense, it just...did. It was beautiful and interesting and utterly fantastic, just like Kurt himself was when he wasn't being a complete pain in my ass.

"The kitchen's through here," the aforementioned beautiful pain in my ass tossed over his shoulder before discarding his cape and  _ushanka_  on a nearby bench seat. I followed suit with my own jacket and hat, trying not to be put out at the idea that we were having coffee in the kitchen rather than in a sitting room or something. Not that I had any room to be a snob or anything, it's just that even I knew how to treat a guest like a guest. And really, he'd run me over in his car and coerced me into driving him home from the hospital. Which, of course, was all in the plan, yes, but I'd agreed to the plan thinking that Kurt Hummel wasn't some kind of rude, anti-social jackass!

_He was raised isolated, home tutored,_ Cooper's voice piped up to remind me then, and I felt a blush of shame heating up my cheeks as we arrived in the kitchen. It wasn't like me to be so judgmental. I chalked it up to being on edge thanks to Cooper and to my still aching shoulder.

"I don't have many house staff apart from a part-time cleaning lady, so I hope you don't mind if we stay in here, Mr...." Kurt glanced back over his shoulder at me, raising one strong eyebrow in inquiry.

Oh, right. "Anderson," I replied, marveling at how we'd gotten through a nearly hour long drive without introducing ourselves. "Blaine Anderson."

"Blaine Anderson," he repeated, as if trying it out. A tiny smile tipped up the corners of his mouth, making him look like something other than an irritable statue for the first time since he'd woken me up in the hospital. "You know who I am, of course."

The doctor had stated his name when he went over Kurt's condition with me, so I could answer without it being a lie. "The doctor might have mentioned your name. Kurt."

He simply nodded and turned towards an elaborate coffee machine, one of those big professional jobs like you saw in coffee shops, the kind that can make you every kind of coffee ever and maybe iron your clothes and walk the dog besides, it can do so much. "Have a seat. Preference?"

I pulled out a chair at the small kitchen table. "Ah...medium drip." It wasn't even a challenge for the behemoth of a machine, I knew, and Kurt's half smile fell away into disappointment. Amazing how he didn't have to say anything to make me feel like a complete rube. "Sorry. I know it's not exciting. I just like coffee...I've had enough excitement in my life that I really appreciate the simpler things."

That caught his attention again. "Oh? What do you do?"

_Stupid!_ Why had I said that? I couldn't  _really_  tell him why my life was too exciting for comfort, and the pre-scripted backstory Cooper had written out for me wasn't going to exactly wow the guy.

Kurt Hummel was trouble with a capital T. I'd never had so many issues with cozying up to a mark or keeping my story straight before, not ever. His inscrutable good looks and fascinating hauteur were the worst distractions in the world...and not for the first time, I wondered what Cooper's true intentions were with this con.

A gentle throat clearing snapped me out of the hamster wheel of my thoughts, and I shot my gaze up to meet Kurt's. He was going through the process of making my coffee, but his eyes were still on me, mildly amused. One perfect eyebrow was arched yet again. "Mr. Anderson?"

"Yes. Sorry." I had to scramble. Thanks to my unusual ineptitude, I was going to have to think on my feet. And sadly, in situations that didn't involve dodging bullets or moving money, I wasn't as quick as I might have liked. "What was the question?"

That eyebrow arched higher, those lips quirked further in amusement. "I asked you what you did for a living."

Smooth, Blaine. Very smooth.

"Antiques," I replied, accepting the cup of coffee he handed me and taking a long sip. "Thank you. It's perfect."

"I'm glad." He set to making himself a cup of something more elaborate – a latte, maybe? Milk was involved. "And antique dealing is...exciting?"

_It is now_ , I thought in rueful chagrin. Or at least, I'd make it so. I'd have to run the adjustments I was about to make to Cooper's script by him later and hope he wasn't too annoyed. "My brother and I deal worldwide in high-end art and furniture. Mostly European, of course, although we've dabbled in Asian markets here and there. We've been doing it since we were kids. With our dad."

_Ha._ Cooper and I hadn’t seen our dad since the day old man Anderson dumped us on the orphanage steps.

"He used to take us around the world. Singapore, Indonesia, Latvia, Denmark..." And in none of those countries had we ever dealt in antiques...well, not legally. But I couldn't tell Kurt that. "You know. Lots of travel, picking up ancient tapestries and jewelry boxes and medieval bedsteads..."

Even I could tell my story wasn't approaching anything close to excitement. It was a travelogue, plain and simple, and that was no way to interest anyone, even if they'd been locked up their whole lives. Indeed, Kurt's expression as he joined me with his own coffee was abstract, his blue eyes distant and bored. "Uh huh."

"Last year we were able to get in on a cache of medieval weaponry and armor – not our usual thing, but my brother thought we could find some buyers..." But even as I said it, I watched Kurt's eyes glaze over and his head began to droop.  _Rude._ "Sorry. Am I boring you?"

All right, I'd gotten a little sharp there, especially given that I knew I  _was_  being boring, but really.  _Really!_ A little effort!

"No!" Kurt's eyes snapped back to me and he sat up straight, guilt all over his fine features. "I'm sorry! It's just...I'm not..." He took a deep breath and made a deeper effort to focus on me. "I'm not very good with people. I haven't really been out much...ever."

My turn to feel guilty, now. I'd had Cooper most of my life, and Santana too the last few years. I hadn't ever once known or considered what it might be like to not have any kind of sibling or friend around. And Cooper had even told me Kurt hadn't been seen in public in years!

Kurt wasn't the jerk here. My cheeks burned with shame.

"No, Kurt, I...I'm not actually very exciting, anyway," I mumbled. "I was just trying to be interesting because  _you_ seem interesting."

The half-smile returned as he cocked his head to look at me, his face faintly blushed with pink. "Really?"

I couldn't help but let out a sigh. I deserved to fail spectacularly for even trying to deviate from Cooper's script. I didn't know what I'd even been thinking. My head dropped. "Yeah."

Cooper was going to kill me for screwing this up. And I would never be free.

A strong, graceful hand slipped across the table to tap the back of mine. I glanced back up to see Kurt smiling at me for real, now, a smile that reached all the way to his incredible eyes.

I fell in. Absolutely, completely, and head over heels.

He opened his mouth to speak, a tiny spark of mischief lighting his entire face. "Can I...can I show you something?"

_Absolutely._

 

***

 

"When I said I thought you were interesting," I called up to Kurt, "I wasn't asking you to prove it."

"Just throw the chainsaw, Blaine."

It turned out that for a shut-in, Kurt really _did_ lead a far more interesting life than I could ever hope to achieve – and I'd once had to defend myself at sword point on a narrow bridge over a canyon.

He'd shown me his collection of vintage hats from around the world, years of painstaking effort expended stalking eBay and sending his trusted buyer – a young man named Chandler – to carefully selected estate sales. He'd demonstrated to me his skill on not only the harp, but also the ukulele, piano, violin, and didgeridoo. He could wield sai and katana like an ancient master. He’d pointed out the windows at the sculpted hedges I already knew about. A small upstairs room lined with shelves displayed the fruits of a lifelong obsession with building model cars and ships in bottles. The next room was full of ball gowns, sketched, designed, and constructed by him, bodices exquisitely hand-beaded in a way that made me wonder how he wasn’t completely blind.

Another room was filled with the most ethereal and delicate blown glass sculptures I'd ever seen. His kiln and setup shared basement space with a pottery wheel, an easel, and an absolutely enormous Bang-Olufson stereo that Kurt promised he'd had linked into every room in the house, "Even the bathrooms. My dad liked music when he was...well. You know."

Kurt could do just about _anything._ He even spoke French, Spanish and Russian with astounding fluency, which was better than the indifferent collection of rude or utilitarian phrases that had always gotten Cooper and me around Europe. "And I'm trying to learn Japanese," Kurt had added. "But that's an ongoing process."

And then there was the juggling. Fruit, bowling pins, some of his smaller glass sculptures, and now chainsaws. Chainsaws, while he perched ten feet above me, pedaling a unicycle back and forth to stay in place. He had two chainsaws already in hand – he'd carried them up the ladder to the platform he used to mount the unicycle – and was just waiting on me. "Come on, Blaine. I promise, I'll catch it."

"Honestly, Kurt, I'm really not comfortable with -"

"But I'll catch it!"

When I stayed frozen in place, the whirring chainsaw clenched tightly in my hands, he sighed and turned his chainsaws off, pedaling back over to the platform to dismount with ease and climb back down. "It's all right," he assured me as he came over and turned off the saw I still held. "I haven't checked my insurance policy in a while to see if it still covers circus accidents."

"Why do you _do_ all of these things?" I blurted, more amazed than ever. Cooper's poor little rich brat was nothing of the kind – no sheltered flower, no retiring lord of the manor. Why should he ever want to follow me once I left this estate? He already led a better life than I ever could and he never had to leave home.

Kurt collected the chainsaws in silence and stowed them away in a nearby shed with his other juggling supplies and his archery equipment. All the light had gone out of his face at my question, leaving him sober and quiet. "I collect hobbies," he said at last, picking up his discarded cape from a nearby lawn chaise. "There wasn't a lot for me to do when I couldn't go to school because of bul – because of reasons. I mean, I had a tutor, but beyond that..." He shrugged. "So I'd see people do things on television or whatever, and I decided I wanted to learn the things, too. And I got books and stuff and...here we are."

I could only stare at him. "You're amazing."

Pink tinted his cheeks again, and he didn’t look at me. “It’s just something to do while I’m here.”

“But…” I shook my head. “I mean, how do you plan to use all of these skills?”

“I don’t know.” He took my hand and led me back into the house, guiding me down the corridors to yet another room, this one papered over with photographs, close ups of things like toothpaste curls and scarred, bug-pocked squash. “I’m not a planner. I just do what I want to do. Here.” He dropped his cape and my hand and picked up a watermelon. Part of it was cut out and covered over with electrical tape and plastic. “Look at this pinhole camera.”

It was heavy when he put it in my hands, he put his hands over mine to steady the contraption. I had to work to keep my voice still at his touch. “This is a camera?”

“Mm. A pinhole camera. You can make a pinhole camera out of anything hollow and dark.”

Vague memories of a kiddy encyclopedia I had read long ago swam up. “Right. It’s got to warp the image though, right?”

“Of course. That’s the magic of it.” One of his hands thumped the side of the watermelon, the hollow sound a dull, but pleasant thump. His mouth twitched back into his half-smile. “You could point this at anything, at fabric, or a pile of pennies, or your – your face.” His eyes met mine then, a quick flash of aqua before darting away. “Point it at any menial, everyday thing and depending on how the pinhole eats the light, it comes out warped and peculiar, odd and imperfect. It’s not a reproduction…” He took a deep breath and this time his gaze didn’t dart away, it held mine as I held my breath. “It’s storytelling.”

I didn’t want to blink, didn’t want to miss a moment of him looking at me, seeing me. “It’s a lie that tells the truth,” I breathed.

“I don’t know about truths,” he said, sad around the edges again. “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells, the less you know.”

It was the most perfect thing I had ever heard. Cooper couldn’t have written anything better.

“So…” I pulled the watermelon away and turned to set it on the table. This time, it was my hand that took his. “What changed between now and an hour ago? Because for someone not great with people, you’re one hell of a conversationalist.”

Kurt looked at me, startled, blue-eyed and swiftly pink-cheeked. His mouth tilted into a smile again, a full, real one. “Oh. Well. Shit.”

***

Another hour later, he kept hold of my hand as he walked me out to my car. “You really have to go?”

It wasn’t as if I wanted to. Unfortunately, Cooper had started to barrage me with so many text messages, my coat pocket sounded like I’d taken up beekeeping. I wasn’t supposed to have been here this long. “I wish I didn’t. I just…we have a lot to do before the boat sails from New York day after tomorrow.”

“The boat. Right.” I’d finally told him about the trip over a second cup of coffee, setting my hook with reluctance and in extreme brief. He’d seemed nonplussed more than anything, and I had some faint hope that maybe I had failed. Maybe we wouldn’t drag this fascinating, too-gorgeous man into our cesspool. I didn’t know. His eyes were opaque as he tilted his head. “Italy.”

“Yeah. Should be fun.” I didn’t want to let go of his hand. It was firm, but the skin was soft, almost silky. I let my thumb brush over his and watched as his face pinkened again in a slow burn. I decided that I might never tire of that. “Listen, Kurt I…I meet a lot of people in my job I have to, uh, professionally act interested in.”

He just kept looking at me, eyes still unreadable.

“It’s nice. I mean, it’s nice to be genuinely interested in someone.”

His mouth tipped up on one side. “One more coffee?”

I wanted to. I really did. But my pocket was buzzing again and I couldn’t help my sigh. “I’m sorry. Cooper has a long list of things for us to do before we fly out tonight.”

“Got it,” Kurt said, nodding his head as he withdrew his hand from mine. “Well, come by for coffee when you come back. I’ve got a lot of other rooms I can show you.”

That made _both_ of us blush.

“Goodbye, Kurt,” I managed, clapping my hat onto my head and ducking down into the Caddy.

“I’ll see you, Blaine.”

I drove off, and he stayed rooted on the spot on his driveway. I kept my eyes on him in the rearview mirror until a curve took him out of my sight.


	5. Chapter 5

“He’s not coming,” I announced to no one in particular.

The captain of the steamer kept coming by to where we were leaning on the railing, had been doing so for at least an hour. Cooper kept sending him away with increasingly large folded stacks of cash, the serene look on his face unruffled by my pronouncements of gloom. Santana stood by with a knife and a small slab of wood, heating the tip of her blade with a pocket acetylene torch and using it to carve intricate pictures into the soft pine. Her face was creased in concentration, yet otherwise as serene as Coop’s – except when she rolled her eyes at me.

Cooper turned to lean his back against the boat rail, closing his eyes as he tilted his face toward the sun like a cat. “He’ll come.” He held up a deck of cards, and the card facing me was a five of hearts. I shook my head. With a shrug, he shoved the cards back into his jacket pocket, and his nonchalance annoyed the shit out of me.

“He won’t.” In my hands, my hat was a crumpled mess, and my formerly neatly-combed down hair was worse. “I need more time with him. Two days.”

“You’ll have two weeks on the boat,” my brother drawled.

Exasperating. “I need the two days to get him _on_ the boat, Cooper,” I explained, resisting the urge to try to tip him over the railing and into the murky water below. That was a move that had never worked out well for me. “He isn’t hooked. Yeah, we spent a couple of nice hours together, but a lot of it wasn’t really talking, it was drinking coffee and me asking him to please stop throwing chainsaws around.”

One blue eye opened and rolled to focus on me, squinting slightly in the sun. “It isn’t the talking that hooked him.”

Clearly there was no getting through to my brother. I sighed and turned away from the pier, assuming a position much like Cooper’s against the railing. I was glad my jacket was dark. It wouldn’t show the streaky dirtiness of the railing like Cooper’s white jacket was currently doing. “I think you’re wrong.”

That, of course, was when we all heard the unmistakable sound of a Ferrari Enzo screaming into port and then wrapping itself around a pylon.

“Am I?” Cooper asked, his insufferable shit-eating grin lighting up his face. Santana, on his right, was snickering, though her gaze had never once left her little slab of abstract art.

I pushed off the railing. “Your jacket’s filthy,” I informed him, pushing off the railing and going to meet Kurt, Cooper’s furious cursing filling the air behind me.

As I stepped down the gangway, Kurt was busy tugging an enormous Vuitton steamer trunk out of his now thoroughly totaled Enzo. I took a moment to reflect on the heartbreak that was a demolished Ferrari. I knew there were sadder things in the world, but they were not, at this moment, in front of me in crumpled cherry-red pieces.

Kurt looked up, cheeks flushed from his efforts. “Hi.”

“Hey.” I arrived next to him and wrapped my fingers around one of the steamer trunk handles that he _wasn’t_ touching, helping him pull the unwieldy luggage free from the wreckage. “So. You’re…here.”

“I am.” He placed his hands on his slender hips, sweeping his cape open in that gesture I was coming to enjoy enormously. His gaze bounced around the pier, taking in the boat, the sun, the steamer crew and other passengers coming to gawk curiously at the sight of a handsome man standing next to me and a crumpled mess of an expensive car. “I thought it might be nice to get some fresh air.”

He looked tired, not surprising since he must have driven most of the night to get here. I felt my eyebrows lift. “And you had to come here for it? We’re a long way from Ohio.”

“Mm.” One of his hands disappeared into a coat pocket, emerging with a rubber band wrapped stack of hundred dollar bills. He waved it at me. “I meant to give this to you yesterday. For your bike, and your shoulder, and…well. Yesterday.”

I stuck my hands firmly into my trouser pockets. “Not necessary, thanks.”

“Oh.” His hand dropped a bit, along with his face. When he returned the money to his pocket, he glanced down for a moment, and when he looked back up, his expression was nothing but bright-eyed and eager, his mouth curved into a lopsided smile. “So. Tell me again where we’re going?”

As we strolled up the gangway, arm in arm, I put my free hand into my jacket pocket.

My fingers brushed against a rubber band-wrapped stack of cash.

***

I managed to keep Kurt busy with checking in and unpacking – and away, not so incidentally, from my brother and Santana – until the steamer was well underway and chugging out to sea. I didn’t know why it felt so important to me to put off the inevitable meeting. It’s not like that’s the thing that would trigger the con.

No, I’d already done that part, and it was one of a handful of times in my life that I felt almost grimy in the soul having done it.

Still, there was no escaping it, and so once I’d helped Kurt hang up the last of his astonishingly large travel wardrobe (“Two weeks at sea, three meals a day, leisure time, activities – you can tell me all you like that this is a small boat, Blaine, but there are still people here who will see me, and I do intend to look my best at all times.”) and he’d changed into a slim fitting black ensemble, I guided him out to the leisure deck, where my unfairly handsome brother in a new, unmarred white suit and matching Panama hat was busy cheating at shuffleboard with a glaring Santana clad in an equally dazzling white suit. She was wearing nothing more than a very snug white crop top underneath, and the two of them together were catching the attention of men and women alike.

“Hey!” The sun was behind Kurt and I, so Cooper was squinting as he waved at us. “Blaine! Thought I’d never see you again! Come on over, bring your friend.”

My feet almost literally dragged as I led Kurt to the gruesome twosome I couldn’t seem to shake. “Kurt, this is my older brother. Cooper, meet Kurt Hummel.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Resting one arm on the handle of his shuffleboard stick, Coop reached out to shake Kurt’s hand. “You’re the asthmatic photographer slash fashion enthusiast?”

Kurt’s left eyebrow shot up nearly to his perfectly shaped hairline. “I suppose that’s one way to put it.”

“This is my assistant and personal masseuse,” Cooper said, reaching behind him to beckon Santana forward. And if I had thought she was glaring before, Cooper should have had a pair of small, neat holes drilled right through his skull at that crack. “Carta Blanca.”

Kurt’s right eyebrow joined the left, and I thought Santana was going to impale my brother with her shuffleboard stick. “Like the beer?” Kurt asked, blinking.

“What? No, of course not.” Cooper’s smile and laugh was the closest I had ever seen him to being surprised. It was gratifying, and worth not telling him every little detail of just how much of everything in the world that Kurt knew despite not being out in it. He cast a puzzled glance at me as he swung an arm across Kurt’s shoulders. “So, you’re traveling. Got plans?”

“I’m not a planner.” Kurt shrugged, and stepped away from Cooper, reaching for my hand.

“Good, I approve,” Cooper said, nodding and tugging his hat down over his eyes. He took a moment to wink at me. I was still startled by Kurt’s apparent enjoyment of holding my hand.

A loud _clack_ broke the awkward silence between us all, as Santana shot her shuffleboard puck and sent Cooper’s puck flying off the deck of the boat and into the Atlantic. “Oops,” she said, batting her eyelashes and fooling none of us for a single second.

Cooper blinked out at the waves his puck had disappeared under. “Hm, looks like you win,” was all that he said, but for some reason, I wasn’t entirely sure that was addressed only to Santana.

***

Kurt’s ensemble for cocktails that night was blue, a teal that made his eyes swirl with oceans. It was patterned with tone-on-tone paisley, a subtle but elegant work of fashion art. “You look amazing,” I said honestly as we pulled our chairs out at our table in the boat’s tiny bar area. Slow, sweet jazz filled the air around us, and the atmosphere was cozy, intimate, despite the fact that we were surrounded by other boat passengers. But we were alone, for this at least.

Cooper and Santana were back in their individual rooms, leaving us quite deliberately alone. “Don’t forget to work on him, soften him up some,” Cooper had reminded me, making that grimy feeling edge across my skin again. Only getting all the honest moments I could in would make this even remotely palatable.

“You look nice too,” Kurt told me, quietly, a hint of a smile on his face and in his voice. I felt my cheeks redden as I looked down at my simple black suit. I’d left my bowtie undone and my collar open in what I thought was a dash of rakish flair. Next to his impeccable perfection, I felt like I should do it all back up. Oh, well. My hair was well under control at least, and I was still smooth-shaven and babyfaced. _All the better to fool you with_ , I thought, and stifled a wince.

The waiter came by and took our drink orders – Scotch for me, and a Vodka Collins for him – and I decided to break the ice. “So…what was your childhood like?”

The question landed between us with a thud. Cooper hadn’t given me a script for this part, and my improvisational skills had been stretched thin over the last couple of days already. Fumbling was how I was going to have to get through this.

Kurt waited until our drinks were before us and the waiter gone again before he cleared his throat, tugging at the well-starched collar of his deep purple shirt. “I made cameras out of watermelons. Designed elaborate costumes.” It was quiet, and succinct, but he looked up at me and he still had that mysterious little almost-smile on his lips.

“Ah. Lonely,” I said, somehow, almost, but not quite able to relate. I had never been alone, not with Cooper there for me my whole life, but he was always so focused on the con, on being somebody new almost every day, that I had sometimes felt lonely. I too often didn’t know who my brother was, if he was my brother that day – and even more often I never quite knew who I was, either.

Across the table, Kurt had the look of a man who was about to launch into a serious story. “When I was ten, they diagnosed the asthma,” he began, fishing in his suit pockets. To my surprise, his long, nimble fingers withdrew a pack of cards. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” I replied, fascinated as he unwrapped the plastic that sealed the deck shut and tossed it aside. He began to cut the deck with an expertise that rivaled Cooper’s.

“Thank you. It keeps me calm.” The cards shuffled and slipped between his fingers, almost dancing. “The asthma diagnosis came on top of bullying at school. I was quiet, if you can believe it.”

I could.

“Being quiet and rich and standoffish and presumably gay doesn’t go over well in Ohio, even if you are only in fifth grade and in a private boarding school.” A neat river of cards waterfalled down from his left hand into his right. He wasn’t even looking at them. But I was hypnotized, caught in thrall to his card tricks and absent, melodic storytelling. “I mean, I didn’t even really know what gay was, then. But people bigger than me did, and they figured I was it, and they gave me hell for it.”

He cupped the cards between his hands and they fluttered into a bridge, then a stack. “So I was quietly stressing out all the time, and the asthma reared its head. I was ten, didn’t know how to tell anyone why I was so stressed, so they gave me an inhaler and sent me back to school. Which, of course, didn’t help. So I was away from home, and I was sick, and I was scared, and I was lonely.”

His hands stilled, the deck sat square in front of him. “Then my mother died.”

I’d known that, but it still sent a jolt of sadness through me. “I’m sorry.”

A graceful hand fluttered away my sympathy. “Dad was distracted then, and he threw himself into his work, and into renovating our house. And things got worse at school, so much worse. The faculty was no help. Every day was just…torture. Until the day that they couldn’t ignore it anymore, when my tormentors were openly taunting me, taking away my books and shoving me into walls and…” He had to take a long drink of his Vodka Collins then. “And threatening my life. And when enough of that had happened in front of enough people, the headmaster called my father about it and my father decided to take me out of school.”

There were no words for my horror. “My god.” Cooper and I had gotten our own share of crap from our schoolmates during the time we’d kicked around in foster care, but it was nothing that couldn’t be taken care of with one swift right hook from Cooper. Bullies seldom tried to provoke us for long. I couldn’t imagine what it might have been like if I hadn’t had him. “I mean…my god, Kurt.”

“I ended up being homeschooled after that. And I was still lonely, but I wasn’t bullied anymore, so there was that.” His hand swept over the deck, spreading all the cards face up in a preternaturally straight line before him. “And I got my high school diploma early, so I had more time to devote to all my hobbies before I was legally old enough to leave. And I was going to leave. But then…” A graceful, one-shouldered shrug. “Then Dad got sick. I couldn’t leave him. And by the time he had a heart attack and died I had basically forgotten what the outside world was really like, so I didn’t go out into it much.”

I shook my head. “God,” I said again, unable to do much more than blink at him, this strong, beautiful survivor of loneliness and heartbreak that I thought would have broken me, had I been in his shoes. “Don’t you feel…I don’t know. Cheated?”

That half-smile ghosted across his face again. “The trick to not feeling cheated,” he said, looking down at the spread deck and plucking the aces out of it, one at a time, “is to learn how to cheat. So I decided this was not the story of a miserable boy, trapped in his home by his own fears and weaknesses, watching his grieving father work himself into a long, slow decline. No.” He slotted the aces back into place and slipped the deck back into a tidy stack. In another moment, he had the deck divided out into four smaller stacks and was turning the top cards up.

They were all aces.

“This was the story of a boy who could find infinite beauty everywhere, in anything. And he could go anywhere he wanted, in his mind. And he could do _everything_.” He stacked the rest of the cards back together, then spread them out again, facedown now, and once more slotted the aces into different places before gathering all the cards back together, using his free hand to tidy them into one stack. “I told myself this story until it became true.”

Kurt peeled the top four cards off of the deck and laid them out, face up. “Now, did doing that help me escape a wasted life? Or did it blind me so that I wouldn’t want to escape it?”

Aces. Again. Cooper was full of shit. _This_ was the greatest card trick in the world.

“I don’t know the answer.” He scooped up the aces, shuffled again, and laid out four cards again, turning them face up one at a time. “But either way, I was the one telling my own story.” He rested his chin in his hand. “So no. I don’t feel cheated at all.”

This time, the cards were kings.

Kurt’s lips tilted up as he watched me, eyes like oceans and just as opaque.

“Dance with me,” I said, and he smiled at me, a real, full, gorgeous smile, and he allowed me to guide him out to the dance floor.

***

A knock came at my door far too early in the morning for my liking. “Breakfast,” Cooper said, an edge in his voice. “Now, Blaine.”

I stumbled up to my feet and out of bed, opening the door to my brother, looking much too dapper for this hour. Despite his terse order, he was smiling. “Thought that’d get you. Come on. Pull yourself together. Phase two starts over mimosas and French toast.”

“Where’s Kurt?” I couldn’t stifle a yawn as I wandered to the tiny sink in my cabin. We’d been up late, so late, dancing and talking. Not that I could tell him the whole truth about anything, which I think must have been more exhausting than dancing the bolero or the late hour in which we’d finally waltzed off to our respective beds. My eye fell on the rubber banded stack of bills tucked into my shaving kit. I’d have to find a way to return that. “Is he still asleep too?”

“Kurt? No. He and Santana have been up for hours. He’s showing her how to make pinhole cameras out of beer cans and cantaloupes he charms out of the wait staff.” I felt Cooper eyeing me up and down. “He looks a damn sight better than you do. Eventful night?”

I ignored him to concentrate on scraping yesterday’s stubble off. If Kurt could look good before breakfast, so could I, damn it.

Within fifteen minutes I was clean, dressed, and heading to breakfast with Cooper. I paused for a moment to slip the stack of cash under Kurt’s cabin door, two doors down from mine. We were going to end up with enough of his money, and I felt dubious enough about that as it was. I didn’t need him offering me any extra.

A surprise awaited me at the table Cooper led me to. Kurt was there, his head bowed over a beer can camera, sun-streaked brown hair blending into Santana’s lighter fall of waves as she leaned in to inspect his handiwork. Santana wasn’t even looking at her hands, which were busy carefully carving the peel off of a bright red apple in one long spiral.

But that was not the surprise. The surprise was the other woman at the table, a brightly smiling blonde in a sleek, fitted black top and short camel-colored miniskirt. Her long legs ended in a pair of shiny black knee-high boots. Very chic, very put together, very much a beacon of trouble.

“I thought I spotted her when we first boarded,” Cooper said, pulling out a chair by the blonde and flopping down into it with a glare at our new companion. She simply continued to smile, picking up a mimosa and allowing her blue eyes to twinkle over the rim. “Wasn’t sure, though. She dodged us all day yesterday, but honestly, we’re going to be out to sea for weeks and this is not a large boat.” He snapped a black linen napkin across his lap and signaled for a waiter. “It would be ridiculous to continue on like that.”

“I agree,” the blonde said, setting her glass down. “Which is why I came to your door this morning. Well, and to see if I could catch you in nothing but a towel again. You remember Philadelphia, don’t you, Coop?”

Cooper’s eyes narrowed further, a cool pair of deep sapphire chips. “We agreed we weren’t going to mention Philly again.”

“Well, well. Look who’s no fun at all in his advancing age.” She leaned across the table, tapping one perfectly manicured red fingernail on the table in front of Kurt’s camera. “Hi there. I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Holly Holliday.”

“I’m thirty-six,” Cooper sputtered. She ignored him.

Holly was trouble, that was for sure, but I always had liked the way she could rile my brother up. It was as effortless as breathing for her, and very, very funny. I smiled at her. “Hey, Holly.” I leaned down over Kurt’s shoulder as I pulled out the between him and Cooper. “Holly is known in professional circles as The Substitute.”

Kurt looked up from his camera, an interested expression on his face. “Kurt Hummel, pleased to meet you. Professional circles? What do you do?”

“I _am_ a substitute,” Holly said, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “A very overqualified one, but I enjoy the flexibility. I teach Spanish, world history, art history, and geography. And right now I’m heading to Prague for my annual stint as a multilingual docent in the religious art section of the museum there, for fun.” She tilted her head. “What do you do, Kurt?”

“I’m an asthmatic photographer slash fashion enthusiast,” he said, deadpan. To her credit Holly only looked thrown for a second.

“Well, good for you, then!” she exclaimed, her smile just a little more broad than strictly necessary. “That’s great. And now you know what I do, and I know what you do. But do you, Kurt,” she said, sweeping her hand in a broad gesture to take in Santana, a stone-faced Cooper, and I, “know what your fellow travelers here do?”

Kurt swallowed, his eyes darting between the four of us. “Antiques?” he volunteered, frowning just a little.

“Antiques? That’s what you’re calling it these days, Coop? How tame, for you.” Tilting her head up, Holly beamed at the waiter bringing her a plate of French toast, causing the poor man to nearly drop the plate on Cooper’s head. Cooper didn’t seem to know who he wanted to death glare into oblivion more and settled for sulking back in his chair. Holly reached over and booped his nose before continuing. “Antiques. Right.”

“We _do_ run a legitimate antiques reselling business,” Cooper insisted, rolling his eyes heavenward. “That is an actual thing that we do. With a storefront and everything.”

It wasn’t a lie. We had a shop in Southampton. I hadn’t set foot in it since we’d opened it three years ago, and Cooper only went to handle the accounting and such a handful of times a year. It was, of course, a total front to cover what we really did, and it was left in the charge of a kindly old widow with an encyclopedic knowledge of antiques and a surgical steel resistance to haggling attempts.

This was her retirement job. Previously, she’d been infamous for her work smuggling contraband treasure out of war zones. Cooper said she had a murder count that would make me faint, and I believed it.

“What I don’t understand,” Holly was saying, pulling me back to the present, “is how anyone could ascend to the great heights of the Anderson brothers and then abandon it all to do, what? Sell terracotta and dented silver to blue-haired biddies in the Hamptons? Ha. No.”

“We did,” Cooper snarled. “Eat your toast.”

But Holly simply leaned back in her chair, toying with her butter knife. “Gosh, Kurt just looks so confused,” she said, widening her eyes and blinking. “Could it be? He doesn’t know? You actually sold him on the antiques jazz?”

“Eat your toast,” I advised her, with one nervous eye on my brother, who looked like he was about to draw blood.

She ignored us both. “Kurt Hummel, my boy,” she said with an expansive sweep of her butter knife, “you are in the presence of Cooper and Blaine Anderson, two of the most respected _smugglers_ of antiques in the Western world.”

With a roll of her eyes, Santana tossed her freshly peeled apple straight back over her shoulder and into the water. Cooper’s hand tightened into a white-knuckled fist. And I watched Kurt as his eyes grew wide, cheeks pinkening with – was that excitement? “Smugglers?” he breathed, his gaze shifting slowly between me and Cooper. “Really?”

“We’ve been on the straight for three years now, Holly, and you know it,” Cooper snapped. “Eat your goddamn toast. We’re antiques dealers. That’s that.”

“Oh, well, if _that’s that_.” Holly affected a pompous, mocking air and drew herself up, making a face before tucking into her toast at last. “Then I guess _that_ is _that_.”

It was, of course, not just that. Not at all.

***

“Smugglers, huh?” Kurt rested his crossed arms on the railing of the boat, kicking his feet as they dangled over the edge of the deck. “Wow. It’s an adventure story. Whose idea was it to go straight?”

I had to tear myself away from watching how his hair – again, perfectly styled – fluttered ever so slightly in the sea breeze. I tried to be surreptitious about running a hand over my own hair to make sure it was still neat and tidy. When I answered him, my gaze was on my brother, at the other end of the deck, in deep and animated conversation with Holly. “Mine,” I said, watching as Cooper paced the deck and ran his hands through his dark hair before turning back to jam a chiding finger up in front of Holly’s very amused face. “Coop’s always loved the life. I mean, even though he was almost killed on a run to Jakarta.”

A sharp intake of breath from Kurt. “Really? What happened?”

“Well, it was her fault, actually,” I said, turning to face him. “Holly’s, I mean. She’d gotten herself in over her head in a smuggling deal and Coop was the only person who could get there fast enough.” I had to swallow when I remembered the aftermath of it all. “He got her out, but not before she’d broken her right wrist and he’d gotten the crap beat out of him by these two huge guys with heads like canned hams.”

Black eyes. A blue-black bruise on his left side where they’d caved in three of his ribs and narrowly missed his heart. A broken femur. A concussion. Holly had had to drag him to the getaway vehicle she couldn’t drive, and she’d told me later he’d screamed for hours as he somehow, miraculously, got them to a hospital.

I decided not to fill Kurt in on the fine details. His eyes were big enough as it was.

“Sometimes I think he’d like to go out of this world while on the job,” I said, voicing for the first time ever a thought I tended to keep shoved to the back of my mind. “I think it would be his idea of the perfect death. Cornered at midnight on a run to Jakarta, or Tampico, or some other city with a dark underbelly.” I let my eyes fall shut and tried to push away surging memories of nightmares I’d had for years. “That’s his dream. To tell a story so perfect it fulfills itself. That would make it all real for him, somehow.”

Kurt shifted, pulled his legs back up onto the deck and faced me, crossing his legs beneath him with an enviable ease. “That’s kind of the thing we all want,” he said, his voice hesitant. He seemed horrified, but working to cover it up with his best attempt at reassurance. “Don’t you think?”

“Not me.” I leaned my head against the railing. “Trying to get something real by telling yourself stories is a trap.” I sniffled, realizing almost too late that there were tears in my eyes. I managed to turn my head away with effortful casualness, fixing my eyes again on my older brother, now alone, still pacing the deck. “Trust me on that one.”

Kurt was quiet after that. Quiet for too long. When I turned my head back towards him, he wasn’t there.

“Don’t fall in love with him, Blaine.”

I looked up, squinting. Everyone moved like ninjas, apparently. I hadn’t heard Kurt leave, nor had I noticed Cooper walking up behind me. He was backlit by the sun, so I couldn’t see his face. “I wasn’t planning on it.” As with so many things, it wasn’t a lie.

“Good, because you can’t.” He joined me on the deck, wincing slightly as he eased himself down to sit next to me – a lingering souvenir of Jakarta. Digging into the pocket of his trousers, he pulled out a deck of cards and started to shuffle it. “That’s the only danger in this, you falling for him.”

I let it pass. Because I wasn’t going to fall in love with him. “He’s different, Cooper. He knows…” I took in a deep breath. “Sometimes I feel like he knows everything. That doesn’t bother you?”

Cooper focused on his deck, cutting it. “No. But something about him sure is bothering you.” He held up the deck so I could see the three of clubs. I shook my head.

“He’s too…he feels like one of your characters.” I wished I had a Scotch. I had to settle for staring my brother down sober. And I waited. He stared back, his mouth curved in his trademark half-smirk, and he just shuffled his cards again. But I kept waiting. Kept staring.

The smirk relaxed into a smile. “Come on, Blaine. The day I con you is the day I die.”

I wanted to believe him. I needed to believe him. And his gaze wasn’t wavering, his smile wasn’t budging. I wanted to believe him, because I wasn’t going to fall in love with Kurt. I was pretty sure I was _already_ falling. After the card trick, after his story, after dancing, after how beautiful he was, how could I not?

But I couldn’t think about that. I cleared my throat and let my gaze fall from Cooper’s. “So. You got Holly? On our budget, and after Philly?”

“Right? I know, it’s crazy after what she did. But she’s the best, Blaine. And she was headed to Prague at the right time – we got lucky, the museum asked her to come a few weeks early.” Cooper chuckled. “I just have to be sure not to let her anywhere near me half-naked and vulnerable again.”

“Yeah. Because you’re so good at that.” I would need both hands, my feet, and some help from Santana to count up all the times my brother had let Holly get into his bed, under his skin, and away with everything short of murder. I didn’t think he loved her, but boy, he sure was susceptible to some pretty severe dumbness when she was around. “Best of luck with that one.”

“Hey, I could manage it one day.” Cooper’s smile let me know he didn’t believe it any more than he expected me to. And in the next minute it had dropped off and he was serious, and he hadn’t forgotten how he’d started this entire conversation. “Blaine, I’m deadly serious. Do not fall in love with Kurt. Mexico is closer than you think.”

Before I could protest, or even think of protesting, he’d heaved himself to his feet with a pained grunt and sauntered off towards the bar.


	6. Chapter 6

“Wow,” Kurt said, eyes huge as he took in the port of Genoa. Well, his eyes had been huge for the last few days as our little steamer passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and chugged along the Mediterranean coastline. He’d wanted to stop everywhere – Gibraltar itself, Málaga, Barcelona, Marseille, Monaco… _especially_ Monaco. Apparently he had a Princess Grace obsession, which did not surprise me in the slightest.

But today his eyes were locked on Genoa as it rose above our heads, ancient buildings and rolling hillsides. Looming nearby was the historic _Lanterna_ , Genoa’s primary landmark and the fifth tallest lighthouse in the world. Kurt’s eyes drank it all in and demanded more.

I wanted to stay here and watch him, glorious and full of wonder in the Italian sun, but Cooper and Holly had yet to meander off the boat. Santana was nearby, scowling and flicking her Zippo lighter open and shut, already smoking her third cigarette as she stood by her small mountain of Italian leather luggage. Cooper’s luggage was by mine, and Kurt’s…

 …well, the porters were still dragging all of Kurt’s luggage down to the dock.

I started towards the boat to see if the crew would let me back on to find my brother, which of course is when he and Holly sauntered onto the deck and down the gangway, arm in arm and with expressions on their faces I had seen far too many times in the past. My eyes rolled skyward at the sight of them, but at least I managed to stifle the urge to sigh.

 “Squirt!” The nickname he always used for me, the nickname I had always, always detested, and he always ignored my protests. Planting a kiss on Holly’s cheek, he waved her off and bounded down the gangway over to me, literally skidding to a stop. “How are ya this fine Italian morning?”

 “Is it wise to mix business with pleasure?” I asked him, tilting my head to indicate Holly. She was with Santana now, the two of them air-kissing each other’s cheeks and I wondered how they managed to make that gesture of friendliness look so damn sarcastic. I looked back at my brother, unnerved by his grin. “We have a job to do.”

 “Holly and I have always agreed that sleeping together is a perk of working together,” Cooper replied, almost airy in his nonchalance. “It’s never gotten in the way, we always get the job done.” 

I raised an eyebrow. “So much for her not catching you half-naked and vulnerable?” 

“I haven’t been vulnerable.” Cooper winked. “Stop being such a wet rag, Blaine. I said don’t fall in love with Kurt, but I didn’t say to not have a little fun with him. Maybe you’d loosen up some if the two of you got some hanky-panky going, eh, Squirt?” 

“You’re disgusting. And I told you never to call me Squirt,” I called after him as he walked away from me, headed over to check our baggage. Useless. I glanced around for Kurt…hm. 

Kurt wasn’t where I had left him, staring wide-eyed at the _Lanterna_. And Holly was nowhere to be seen, either. Santana was standing alone and still smoking by her bags, exhaling acrid smoke clouds into the air. “Have you seen Kurt?” I called, jogging over to her. 

She inhaled her cigarette and faced me, blowing smoke rings into my face. Her only answer was a lazy shrug of one tanned shoulder. 

Panic was just starting to close off my throat when I spotted them, chestnut and blonde heads together, looking down at a piece of paper – a map? A train schedule? Who knew. They were tucked away behind the growing hilltop of Kurt’s luggage, Kurt nodding earnestly as Holly talked and pointed to the paper. 

Just as I was taking my first steps toward them, they shook hands and exchanged air-kisses, the gesture appearing a great deal more sincere than it had between Holly and Santana. She knelt down in her short white sundress and picked up a pair of bags, slinging one over her shoulder as she strode off towards a waiting taxicab. In a moment, she was gone, off to the airport, I assumed. 

She left in her wake Kurt, standing and staring after her. He still held the paper she’d given him and looked thoughtful as I walked up. “Hm. You and Holly seem to have gotten close,” I remarked, working to conceal how nervous the very idea made me. 

He tucked the paper into the pocket of his snug blue jeans and turned to face me. But I could see only half his attention was really on me. “We’ve been talking, yes. She’s a fascinating woman.” 

“I bet,” was all I could muster. I had a lot of words for Holly Holliday. I guessed _fascinating_ was one I could apply in my more charitable moments. 

His hand was still in his pocket, and I could hear the paper rustling between his fingers. “Last night she caught me after dinner. We had a conversation. Well…” He took a deep breath. “She had a proposition.” 

I was doing a lot of eyebrow raising today, it seemed. “She does know you’re – " 

“Yes, yes.” Kurt pulled his hand out of his pocket with an impatient wave. “It wasn’t that. It was… ” Now all of his attention was on me, his body tense, eyes wary. “She’s got a line on something.” 

And we were off, the con back on track. “Oh boy,” I said, almost grateful to be back in a place where I had a script. “What’s she got?” 

“An 8th century prayer book,” Kurt replied, eyes widening. “Did you know she steals pieces from the museum she works for in Prague? And sells them off to smugglers?” 

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” I said, and it was no effort for my words to be dry as the proverbial bone. “I wonder who her fence is?” 

“Probably the Spanish guy,” Cooper said, strolling up with Santana. “Did she say?” 

“Yeah, an Argentinian.” Kurt’s attention was wandering again, eyes on where Holly’s cab had been, the space now occupied with a new yellow taxi. “Argentine? Anyway. She’s going to sell it to a middleman for one million US dollars. Then the Argentine, the guy from South America, he’s going to pay…” He turned back to me with a smile. “Two point five.”

Cooper hissed a breath in between his teeth. “Not bad,” he said, his impressed act bulletproof. 

The script called for me to be genial and apologetic now. I could manage that. I extended my hand to Kurt. “I’m sorry you had to deal with her,” I said, waiting for him. 

But he didn’t move, except to look over his shoulder where the new yellow cab was being loaded with his luggage. I could just see his lips curving up into a smile. 

Hook, line, and sinker. “Where’s that cab going?” I asked. 

Kurt glanced at me, eyes twinkling. “The train station.” 

I dropped my hand. “And the train is going to…” 

“Prague.” His smile was broad now, both hands tucked into his jeans pockets. As he rocked back onto his boot heels, the Italian sun caught and gleamed off of a brooch he had pinned to the black vest he wore over a thin, long-sleeved white t-shirt, a little pair of scissors fashioned to look like a loon. He was beautiful and full of joy and clearly delighted with himself. “Well? What do you say? Do you want to go be smugglers with me?” 

I hated to kill his enthusiasm, but Cooper’s script insisted. “No. Absolutely not.” 

When his face fell, it was just as much a kick in the gut as I had expected. “Why not?” 

I wanted to apologize, to grab his hand and drag him into that cab and say, _of course_ , _let’s go_ , anything to put the smile back on his face immediately, but I had a job to do. “Well, for starters, we don’t have a million dollars.” 

Kurt rolled his eyes. “That’s like…I’ve got…that’s whatever, never mind, that’s nothing. Give me a _real_ reason.” 

I stepped closer to him, close enough to smell the sandalwood cologne he favored. “We had this talk,” I said in a whisper. “Remember? First night on the boat? Jakarta? This is dangerous, Kurt. It could end very badly.” 

I could see the shadows of concern flicker through his eyes. Behind me, I knew Cooper and Santana were holding their breath. 

Drawing back, Kurt lifted his chin, standing as straight and tall as a marble statue. “I happen to think a little danger might suit me,” he said, noble and proud. I heard a pair of surreptitious sighs of relief at my back. Kurt bent down and picked up a small Vuitton bag. “So. If you decide to join my smuggling gang, well. I’ll consider it.” 

He was marching off towards the cab, nearly there by the time I found my voice again. “It’s not an adventure story,” I called after him, admiring his sheer audacity. 

“What are you talking about?” He spun around, but he kept walking backwards, not a care in the world and a big smile on his face. “Of course it is!”

 

***

“We should arrive in Prague tomorrow evening, just in time for dinner and an early turn-in.” Cooper was shuffling cards on the table between us on the train that night, dealing out a hand of rummy to both of us. I didn’t touch my cards. I knew he’d stacked the deck somehow. “We can do that nice goulash place you like.”

“Uh huh.”

I heard the rest of the deck slap down on the table, and the next thing I knew, Cooper was leaning across it and had my chin in his hand, forcing my face up so I had to look at him. “Jesus, you have been a pill all day, Blaine. What is it now?”

What wasn’t it? Ever since we’d gotten on the train, Kurt had been high and joyful, excited about “his” caper. He and Santana had even made a “practice run” with the contents of the snack car. “We’re smuggling,” he’d said, breathless and pink cheeked as the two of them crouched on the floor under the window of our private berth. The train porter ran by, shouting, his face red. Kurt and Santana put their heads together over a pack of Fudge Stripe cookies and giggled.

And that wasn’t all. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a wad of white cloth, hurling it across the table. “I’m a pill? Well, maybe I have good reason. Take a look.”

Blinking, Cooper unfolded the cloth and spread it out on the tabletop. It was a small rectangle of soft white material, a flag, really, with _Kurt Hummel, Smuggler_ picked out in the center in a sparkling rainbow of crystals. Swarovski, of course. Who carried Swarovski crystals and a BeDazzler with them on a transatlantic journey?

Although I had to admit, it was pretty adorable that he did.

“Wow, he really does beautiful work,” Cooper murmured, tracing his fingers across the letters. “He did this today?”

“Up on the observation deck, after he and Santana got banned from the snack car,” I confirmed. “She even let him have one of her really nice t-shirts to cut apart for it. Gucci.”

Cooper’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline. “Santana? Santana gave away a possession? Our Santana?”

“Not the point,” I snapped, tugging the little flag out of his hands and stowing it carefully back in my trouser pocket. “He’s getting way too into this, Coop. He’s taking it too seriously.” I picked up the line of cards in front of me, stacking them up and passing them back without even looking at them. “And by the way? Now that I’m seeing it in action, I don’t like this Prague deal you’ve cooked up. It feels like you’re leaving way too much to chance.”

“Blaine.” Cooper’s hands covered the cards and shuffled them back into the deck along with the hand he’d dealt for himself. “Chill out, kid. Your part in this is strictly to sweep Kurt off his feet.” He cut the deck and shuffled it, and as usual, held up half the deck to face me. Ace of spades. “Why don’t you do what I suggested earlier, let him enjoy it? Maybe let yourself have a little fun with it?”

I snatched the half-deck out of his hand and tossed it at him, sending cards flying everywhere. “While it lasts?” I snapped, not even waiting for his response before I slid off the bench and headed out of the berth in search of…anything. Anyone but my brother.

Within a few feet, I nearly literally ran into Kurt, who caught me by my arms and stopped me. His intense eyes examined me for a moment before he said, “If you’d like, I’ve got some _slivovitz_ in my berth. It’s from the Moravian region, and I’m told it’s excellent.”

“Did you ‘smuggle’ it out of the bar car?” I asked, snorting a little at the end.

“I bought it,” he said simply, taking my hand and leading me away from Cooper.

***

He was right. It _was_ an excellent drink, the plum brandy he’d bought. My stomach was warm and my head pleasantly foggy halfway through the snifter he’d handed me. I dropped my head back to rest against the berth door. “This is nice.”

“I’m certainly enjoying it,” Kurt replied, allowing his head to lean drowsily against the train window. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes bright as he watched the German night chug by. “Say, have you ever been on this train before?”

His fuzziness and distraction allowed me to reach into my pocket and wiggle out the stack of cash we’d continued passing back and forth for the last two weeks. Yesterday I’d found it in a pair of my shoes. Tonight I slipped it into the outer pocket of his tote bag. “Once or twice, yes.”

He looked at me, mouth twisting in disappointment. “Oh, well, I guess this is all…” A tiny hiccup escaped his mouth as he waved a hand around. “Whatever to you.”

Well, maybe a little. I took another sip from my snifter before I answered him. “Usually I just play cards with Santana in the bar car.”

Kurt blinked, and it could only be described as _owlish_. “Santa what now?”

 _Shit!_ “Uh, Carta Blanca. Santana’s her, uh, smuggler name.”

His eyes grew even more round. “Ooh. Do I get a smuggler name?”

“No!” It came out too quickly, too sharply, and I stopped to take in a breath or two, hoping to calm the sudden racing of my heart. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap.”

“Mm.” Kurt’s mouth twisted into a scowl, and even though he directed his face towards the train window to hide it, I still saw his eyes roll in the reflection. It stung. Worse, it made Cooper’s voice pipe up in the back of my head. _You’re blowing it, Squirt._

I looked down at my brandy snifter. I knew it was bad form and an insult to the fine drink, but I slugged all the rest of it back down my throat. I didn’t know what else to do. I definitely didn’t know what else to _say_.

Unfortunately, Kurt did. “Did you jam that stick up your ass because someone told you it would be fun?”

I was glad I had already belted back my brandy; as it was, the question so caught me by surprise, so unexpected was anything like that coming from Kurt, that I coughed on nothing at all anyway. And he simply watched as I got myself under control, slowly sipping his brandy, one eyebrow arched and that mouth still twisted with what I could only read as contempt.

When I could breathe again, I uttered only one word. “What?”

“I mean, for someone who goes on globe-trotting adventures, smuggling precious items or whatever, someone who does all the things you do, you’re really uptight. Didn’t you ever notice?” Reaching for the bottle, Kurt topped up his little glass. “And the only conclusion I can come to is that for whatever reason, you’re walking around with a great big stick jammed right up your–”

“Thank you for that colorful imagery,” I blurted out, not sure what I would do if he said the word _ass_ again. It made me want to giggle, but at the same time there was something I liked about the way he wrapped his mouth around the word.

Kurt shook his head, a heavy sigh escaping through his nostrils as he set his glass aside. “I get it, Blaine, you know?” he asked, tilting his head to look at me, his face now smooth and resigned. “I know that I’m not _really_ a… ” He waved his glass in the air. “Dun dun dun… a smuggler. I know it, I get it.”

He had a very fine way of making me feel about two inches tall.

Clambering down off the bed, Kurt crawled across the miniscule expanse of floor to kneel in front of me. He leaned in over my crossed legs, placing his hands on my knees to brace himself as he looked into my eyes. “But you know what else, Blaine?”

I shook my head the very tiniest little bit, so that I didn’t have to look away from the oceanic galaxies of his eyes.

“I am a full-on smuggler,” he announced in a whisper, intense and brandy-scented. “’Cause I tell it like I own it. That’s the secret. Your brother knows it. Carta Blanca knows it. You don’t. Did you ever?”

Once, I might have. Long ago. But I didn’t think so. All the parts in all the cons Cooper wrote, they were just different shades of who I thought I might be. No real work was involved. A tweak here, a tic there, a dash of charm and a dapper wardrobe. I was a blank slate, and any personality I ever seemed to have was from a script.

Being with Kurt seemed like it was the first time I ever felt anything identifiable, from worry to lust to affection. And I didn’t dare trust it.

Kurt was still watching me closely, but he sat back on his heels, rested his slender hands on his strong thighs, still wrapped in snug but soft and worn-looking denim. “Blaine,” he said, still whispering. “You think too much. Slow down. Relax. Enjoy the ride.” One hand lifted to trace along my jawline, fingers leaving trails of fire in their wake. “Be here. Now.”

Outside the train windows, thunder cracked, and lightning lashed across the sky. Kurt leaned in closer, closer. “I love thunderstorms,” he breathed, eyelids closing as he leaned in.

I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to do more. To enjoy him as Cooper had suggested. He was beautiful and fantastic and intelligent and perfect and…

…and we were drunk and it wasn’t real and I could not, absolutely could not do this. Slipping away from his hands and lips, I jumped to my feet and grabbed the door handle. "I've got chlamydia," I blurted, feeling flames rush to my face as I fumbled my way out of the compartment door. I slid it shut behind me with a slam.

And a groan, because there was Cooper, staring at me in rank astonishment and disappointment. "That guy in Mustique, right?" he asked, shaking his head. "I thought I taught you to wrap your johnson."

Ignoring him – and the tightening in my trousers – I rolled off of Kurt's door and went in search of the bar car, Santana, and her pack of cards.


	7. Chapter 7

Sunlight bounced and glinted off of the Vltava River, turning it into a glittering ribbon under the Prague sun. A nearby violinist played an expert mazurka, his sweet and sprightly notes drifting into the morning air while a delicate dancer done up like a broken doll twirled around him. Cooper leaned against the stone wall of the Charles Bridge, pitching pebbles out into the water. “Last time I was in Prague,” he said, tugging the brim of his hat down over his eyes before zinging another rock into the river, “I thought I was in love.”

“Really?” Next to him, Kurt raised one incredulous eyebrow. “You?”

Santana was gracious enough to let me bury my chortles in the shoulder of her Prada jacket. In only a bit over two weeks, Kurt had become the only person in the world who seemed able to discomfit my normally very self-assured brother by seeing through a lot of his bullshit, and I loved it. I was sure it was not at all anything that Cooper had expected when he picked Kurt as our mark.

Cooper managed to rein his scowl back in fairly quickly. “Yes, me,” he said, only the barest edge of petulance in his voice. “It can happen. Well, almost happen.”

“Almost is impressive enough,” Kurt assured him. “What was she like?”

Sending the last of his pebbles skipping across the river’s surface, Coop leaned forward onto the wall. “Pale skin. Lovely feet. A smile that lit up a room.” He let out the smallest sigh. “Well, you’ve met her, you know.”

Of course, in two weeks, Cooper had learned how to play Kurt like a cello: appeal to his innate sense of romance. Between that and Kurt’s excitement about being a “smuggler”, the delicate balance needed for Cooper’s con to work was still achieved. And sure enough, when I looked back up, all incredulity was gone from Kurt’s face, replaced by something I might, were I more poetically inclined, have called enchantment. “Oh, Holly, of course.”

My brother wasn’t at all a candidate for Kurt’s affections, and technically, neither was I, but jealousy still curled like a snake in the pit of my stomach to see Kurt looking at my brother that way. He hadn’t looked at _me_ in two days, nor even spoken a word beyond the occasional, “Hello, Blaine.” It had made mealtimes uncomfortable.

Santana looked at me a lot, though. And every time, her eyes said the same smirking thing: _Boy, did you fuck up_.

I had. I really, really had. And yet if I tucked my hand into my pocket, I could brush my fingers over a rubber band-bound stack of hundreds and know that I really just needed to give Kurt time to thaw out from my rejection on the train. I wished so badly to be able to explain why I had fled, how I didn’t want to touch him with dirty hands, how I wanted him to get out of this as emotionally unscathed as I could manage.

Goddamn my brother for picking Kurt. Goddamn me for, for the first time, being utterly unable to school my emotions like the professional I was supposed to be. Goddamn me for already caring about the one person that was off-limits.

I missed my uncomplicated existence in Mustique every day.

Turning around, Cooper pulled out his Moleskine and flipped it open. “Committee meeting,” he said, paging through worn, well-inked paper. Santana sidled over to stand next to him, peering over his shoulder. “All right. So we’ve been here two days now. Holly’s been here for three, she should be settled into her apartment by now and ready to receive us tomorrow morning.” He traced a finger down the page. “Señorita Blanca spent this morning scouting out the museum, she’s got all the details of guards, patrols, the whole nine. And you.” Coop looked up and pointed at Kurt. “You should go to the bank very soon. That wire you put in at Genoa should have cleared by now.”

Kurt nodded, slightly tentative. “Right. Do I get cash?”

“What?” Cooper threw back his head and laughed, clapping a hand over his hat to keep it from sailing off into the Vltava. “Cash? God no. Kurt, only movie thugs and Russians deal in suitcases of cash. You need to get a certified check.”

“What about Blaine?” He still wouldn’t look at me, was keeping his eyes steady on my brother, but I could hear the nonchalance in his voice was strained, forced. Was he thawing already? “What is Blaine going to do?”

Cooper looked between the two of us. Slowly, he closed his notebook and wrapped it up with its elastic band, stalling to assess the situation. I could see his tongue poking at the inside of his cheek. “Blaine?” he asked at last. “Well, Blaine’s going to escort you to the bank. And then the two of you are going to have lunch. And sightsee. And then have dinner. Alone.”

He didn’t add _and Blaine’s going to fix the mess he made or else_ , but the words hung between all of us as loudly as if he had. Santana’s mouth quirked up into an insufferable smirk.

Kurt’s head tilted up, that elfin nose going right into the air the way only the very rich can seem to pull off. “Well. I suppose we’d better be off, then.” Turning on his heel, he strode off, boot heels clicking on the cobbles of the bridge.

“I suppose you had better.” Cooper let out a low whistle as he stared after Kurt, clearly impressed and amused. “That’s quite a fellow, little brother.”

“He sure is.” I leaned on a sun-warmed expanse of stone wall, propping my chin in my hand as I watched Kurt walk away. I could do that for a long, long time. It was a great view.

Cooper cleared his throat. “He’s quite a fellow, and you should go after him, you dolt, we have a job to do.”

“Oh. Right.” I grabbed my hat from the wall and darted after Kurt, dodging through the crowd and keeping my head down so nobody could see my face burning tomato-red and flame hot.

With his longer legs, brisk stride, and head start, Kurt was off the bridge and had nearly disappeared into the crowd of Czechs and tourists before I caught up with him. Only his too-regal bearing helped me keep him in my sights as I dodged and wove between people. “Kurt, come on. I’m supposed to go with you.”

“I can take care of myself,” he replied, not bothering to look at me. “I know where the bank is, I know today’s exchange rates, I know that many Czechs in the banking industry speak perfectly good English, so I won’t have a problem. You can run along back to your brother, Blaine. I don’t need you.”

Wow, that stung. Hadn’t seen that coming. “I’m supposed to go with you,” I repeated, still reeling from the way his cold words made my stomach twist.

“And you always do what your brother tells you. I know.” His sigh was a mixture of resignation and annoyance, and he still wouldn’t look at me. Which was actually fine, because I’d had to stop to catch the breath he’d just knocked out of me with that statement.

I couldn't even refute it. It was the entire reason why he and I were even here, had even met. And I still hated myself for it, for my moment of weakness, for giving in, for getting Kurt into this mess.

I closed my eyes and stood still in the Prague street, trying to catch my breath and compose myself. To rid myself of the impulse to just run away back to Mustique or some other even more remote island and never, ever look back. _You have a job to do, Blaine. Then you can go. You’ll be quits._

And I would never see Kurt again. And he would know that everything had been a lie.

Because I did as I was told.

Prague swirled and bustled around me, people spitting curses in Czech, French, Dutch, all kinds of languages as I impeded their progress. I kept my eyes clenched shut and my feet firmly planted. I knew Kurt was moving further and further away from me but I couldn’t move. I just couldn’t move, and I couldn’t stop hating myself.

When a warm, smooth hand took hold of mine, I nearly jumped out of my skin. My eyes flew open and met that oceanic gaze, not cold now but worried. “You don’t have a stick jammed up your ass,” Kurt said, squeezing my hand. “You just don’t like yourself very much. Why?”

 _I could write novels on the topic._ “That’s not a story we have time for,” I said, trying to keep it as light as I could. “We’d be here all day, and you have to go to the bank.”

“I wouldn’t be going to the bank if it weren’t for you,” he said. “Blaine, don’t you understand? You changed my life. I’m going to a bank – in the Czech Republic! Before I met you, the furthest I’d been from home was...I don’t know. Chicago, maybe. You dragged me out of my home and across the world. What’s not to like about you?”

Oh, I could write _volumes._

Kurt reached down and grabbed my other hand, pulling both my hands up and clasping them to his be-vested chest. “We’re in Prague,” he said, tilting his chin to rest it on the knot of our fingers, his eyes rolling up and blinking charmingly. “It’s an adventure. I’m having an adventure because of you. I’m sorry I’ve been freezing you out since we got here.”

That got me. “What? No! Don’t be sorry. I’m sorry I rejected you the way I did, Kurt. It was unkind.”

“I’ve noticed you don’t do well with being put on the spot,” he replied, dry as the Sahara. “I forgive you for not taking advantage of me while drunk, and I forgive you for doing so in the the clumsiest way possible. Actually, it was adorable.” He paused. “You don’t really have chlamydia though, right?”

My face was almost painful with how hot it was burning. “I don’t, no.”

“Good.” Standing upright, Kurt dropped one of my hands – but just one. The other he kept firm hold of as he began to drag me down the street. “Come on. Let’s go get some cash and some goulash.” He made the words rhyme, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity. And that seemed to make him happy. “Good. Much better. A world adventurer should always have a smile on their face, especially when they’re as cute as you are.”

Oh, he made me want this all to be real. I wanted to imagine a future where we _both_ took off for somewhere remote and quiet and private, I wanted my unwritten life to include him.

That way lay danger, though.

But the _longing_. It pulled me after him as much as his grip on my hand.

 _Let him enjoy it_ , Cooper had said, but he had also said, _they've all been about you_ , way back, half a month ago when this had all been in its embryonic stages. So – couldn't I enjoy it, too? Maybe I was supposed to? Of course I was. That had been Cooper's entire angle, he’d even said as much on the train.

I just wasn't supposed to fall in love. Well, it was a little late there, that trouble still loomed large and I seemed unable to avoid it despite my clumsy best efforts. But it wouldn't kill me. The aftermath would be unpleasant, but it wouldn't kill me. I could drink it away on my tropical island. And Kurt would heal, he’d lived through worse.

There was no harm in pretending for a little while, right? It was what I was asking Kurt to do, after all. Under the sunshine, with his fingers and mine entwined, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea…

***

Holly's Prague apartment was in a building that never failed to impress me, an imposing stone edifice with a beautiful spiral staircase leading to her tower home – because of course she lived in a tower. Of course.

A large stone angel perched on the railing at the top of the tower, glowering down at us as we ascended. Kurt blinked up at it. "Well, that's unnerving," he commented, pushing his red newsboy cap back on his head to get a better look. "But I suppose it's less unnerving if you're the one living behind it. If I lived here, I'd decorate the thing for Christmas. Tastefully, of course."

"Of course." I smiled at him over my shoulder. The idea was charming. I could picture the glowering seraphim wrapped in a strand of white fairy lights, a golden tinsel boa encircling its neck. The image certainly took a lot of the edge off of the statue's menace.

"Could do without the five story stair climb," Coop grumbled, and Santana nodded in agreement. Well, it had been her choice to wear those pepper-red Chanel pumps today, and Cooper's choice to bring Holly and her elevator-less residence in on the con in the first place, so I didn't feel a whole lot of sorry for either one of them.

I wished I had dawdled to walk up the stairs behind Kurt though. I had a feeling the view of him in the tight white jeans and matching short jacket he'd chosen for today was _spectacular._ In my usual black trousers, open jacket, and white button-down, I felt reasonably put together, dapper even, but still like a dowdy pigeon next to him.

We arrived at the top of the stairs at last, Santana limping off to lean on the railing with a groan. Kurt joined her, making the noises of sympathy I'd never be able to muster in the face of her vicious glare. That left me to my usual position trailing along behind Cooper as he approached the door of Holly's apartment and leaned on the buzzer. “Open up, Holly.”

Lights came on inside the apartment, illuminating the windows at the top of the door. The shuffling of a person in fuzzy slippers crossing a parquet floor was faint, but unmistakable. “Who is it?” Holly’s bleary voice asked, high-pitched and with a slight, sleepy quaver. “Who the hell wakes anyone up at this hour?”

It was ten in the morning.

“A candygram,” Cooper called back, glancing back over his shoulder and rolling his eyes. “Who do you think, Hols? Come on --”

The half turn he’d made to look at us was what saved him. Well, that and the fact that Holly used slugs in her shotgun rather than shells full of pellets. A hole the size of my fist exploded in the apartment door and the slug set the statue teetering. Holly’s second shot threw the door open and sent the statue toppling the five stories down to the building foyer.

We were all flat on the floor well before that happened, all of us screaming bloody murder. Cooper was the most coherent. “What the actual _fuck_ , Holly! Jesus! You could have killed us!”

Kurt was in the furthest corner of the landing he could reach, pressed up against the wall with eyes like dinner plates. I wondered if this still fell within his seemingly broad guidelines for “adventure”.

In the open apartment doorway, Holly appeared, her short and silky white nightie barely covered by a flimsy matching robe. Her hair was a bird’s nest of blonde waves and a double-barreled shotgun dangled carelessly from her right hand. “You wake me up, I wake you up,” she yawned, using her free hand to pluck a lit cigarette from between her lips. “Coffee?”

***

I declined the coffee, as did Kurt. We were awake enough.

“All right,” Holly began, leaning forward to spread a large map of the museum out across her coffee table. It did not escape my notice that the movement gave my brother a perfect view down the lacy décolletage of her skimpy nighty. Didn’t escape his notice, either. Holly kept her eyes on the map, but her smirk was visible from space. “So. Here’s the basilica. In this building here, next to it, are the offices of administration. Underneath those -- and otherwise completely inaccessible -- is a little bitty section of catacombs. That’s where the book is.” She tapped on the spot labeled with a _C_. “I’ve been in and out of the space a million times over the years. The doorway is right behind a copy machine that we use for paperwork and brochures, and the machine’s on a cart. I shove it aside, go in, get the book, get out, and meet you for drinks.”

“Easy as that, huh?” Cooper leaned back in his seat.

Holly shrugged. “Pretty much. So, two o’clock tomorrow at that little bistro? It’s not the least busy hour of the day for the museum, but the likelihood is that no one will bother me, and I assume you have a distraction planned if we need one.” She tilted her head back to indicate Santana, who was camped out by the antique bar cart in the corner draining a bottle of Campari.

“We have something in mind, yeah.” Cooper’s gaze was still glued to Holly’s cleavage, but I was happy to see the display wasn’t impeding his mental faculties. This time. “We’ll be ready if you need us.”

“Let’s hope I don’t, of course.” She rolled the map back into a tube and stood up, waving towards her blasted-open front door. “Well, thanks for stopping by, folks, but I have a party to throw tonight, carpenters to call in, and a trip to the liquor store to make.” She glared at Santana, who glared right back. “Busy day ahead. Shoo.”

Cooper affected a pout as he stood up. “A party and you didn’t invite us?”

Holly raised an eyebrow. “You want to meet the rest of the museum staff? When did you get into deliberately upping the danger factor of your jobs? It’s always been an accident before.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Prying the Campari bottle out of Santana’s fingers, Cooper hustled her towards the door. “I get it. Fine, we’ll get out of your hair, you lunatic.”

“Aw, Cooper, you’ve never been so sweet.” Holly splayed her hand out across her chest, fluttering her eyelashes. “I’m touched. So touched. Get out. Come back for breakfast tomorrow, 8 AM.”

Coop was out the door with a roll of his eyes and a grumbling Santana in tow. I caught Kurt’s eye and nodded towards the door. He nodded back, but just as he was opening his mouth to say something, Holly caught him by the arm. “I’m going to need Kurt here for a minute,” she said, squeezing his bicep. “Ooh. You work out, don’t you, honey? Listen, I need to talk to you about that hippo-head brooch you were wearing on the boat, I forgot to ask you sooner and I’m in the market for an unusual birthday present for a friend.” She looked at me with a sweet smile I didn’t trust for a minute. “Run along, Blaine. He’ll meet you downstairs soon.”

I didn’t want to leave him, but I already knew she could use the shotgun she casually let her gaze wander towards, so out the door I went, trailing after Cooper and Santana.

I stopped two flights down and waited, unable to relax again until I heard Kurt’s boot heels clattering down the stairs. He swung his hand to catch mine and once again, pulled me after him. “Let’s go back to that goulash place, Blaine. I’m hungry, and they had the best apple tea.”

“Did you give her what she asked for?” I asked, grabbing hold of my hat to keep it on my head as he tugged me out into the sunshine.

“Yep.”

Not the brooch information, of course.

And so the con rolled on...


	8. Chapter 8

The next morning, when Cooper rang Holly’s buzzer, he did so standing well away from the door. “Morning, Holly.”

We were all of us pressed back against the wall, out of the way of any shotgun blasts. Kurt was pressed up against me, hands gripping my shoulders. I couldn’t say I didn’t like it, even if it was out of terror.

Carefully, Coop reached over to knock on one of the pieces of wood that had been clumsily nailed on to cover the holes from Holly’s prior day antics, snatching his hand away almost as soon as it had made contact. “Holly?”

“I think we’re a little early,” I said glancing at my wristwatch. It was 7:45 AM. Cooper just shrugged at me and knocked again.

It was quiet. No lights came on. No shuffling slippers, no shotgun. Cooper looked at Santana. “You got anything?”

Rummaging in her oversized black shoulder bag, Santana pulled out a heavy-duty screwdriver and nodded. Within seconds she had the patch nearest the doorknob pried off and was able to reach up inside to undo all of the locks. The door swung open.

The apartment, yesterday full of furniture and antique weaponry and shelves and shelves of books, was empty. A tube of paper rolled across the floor in the wake of the wind kicked up by the door opening – Holly’s map. It was surrounded by a few more scraps of miscellaneous paper, receipts and notes. Apart from a large mirrored armoire, that was all that was left behind.

“Damn.” Cooper bent down to pick up the map. “She’s gone.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” I grabbed the handle of the armoire and swung it open to look inside. “Probably halfway around the world by now.”

“Aren’t you kind of early?” Holly hissed up at me, crouched inside the armoire in her nightgown and robe, lilac today instead of white. I swung the door shut again.

Cooper paced the parquet. “I don’t get it,” he said, tapping his lower lip with the rolled up map. “If she was hightailing it, why invite us for breakfast? And why not just wait a few hours until we exchange the book for the cash? Then she’d have some walking around money.”

I was watching Kurt, who was kneeling on the floor, picking through the scraps of paper. I saw the moment he went even more white, as pale as the discarded receipt he had just picked up. His eyes widened in that expression I was becoming accustomed to seeing, and his mouth dropped open. “Oh, no.”

That got Cooper’s attention. “Oh, no?”

The slip of paper fluttered from Kurt’s fingers as he stood up. “Oh, no,” he said again, his cheeks flushing red as he raised his hand to cover his mouth.

No, it had never been about that brooch.

***

“Money’s gone,” Cooper said, tossing a bank slip down on the cafe table. We were at the bistro by the museum, the designated meeting place. My brother flung himself down into the little metal chair without so much as a pained grunt. “She cashed it yesterday afternoon, probably when she was making her liquor run. It’ll be deposited in a Swiss bank account by now.”

It was. Well, three quarters of it was, split amongst three bank accounts in Geneva that only Coop, Santana and I could access. Holly’s share, who knew? Probably the Caymans.

Cooper reached across the table to pat Kurt’s hand. “I’m sorry Kurt. Really, I am.”

“It’s just such a waste.” Kurt had been morosely pondering his apple strudel, but lifted his head to look at us, shaking it with a sorrowful expression on his face. “That poor guy, the Argentine one, he’ll never get his book now.”

I felt a frown furrow my brow. “That’s what you’re worried about?”

“Well, yeah.” Kurt frowned back at me, looking at me like I was an idiot. “He wanted that book so much, and now it’s just going to sit there, buried in that museum, rotting away in the catacombs…” He paused, voice trailing off and his gaze drifting into the nowhere zone, towards the basilica. I didn’t like the look on his face. It was suddenly open and bright and inspired.

“Oh, no,” I breathed. Because here was the part of the con I dreaded most, and here was Kurt playing right into my brother’s hands.

Cooper touched Kurt’s hand again, this time actually grabbing it. “I know what you’re thinking, Kurt, but there’s no actual book. She conned us. It doesn’t exist.”

“You know that for sure?” Pulling his hand away, Kurt settled back in his cafe chair, crossing his arms over his chest. The stubborn set of his chin made my heart sink. “I bet you don’t. I bet there is a book, and Holly gave us every single piece of information we need to find out.”

“Kurt, you got swindled.” I wished he’d back out of this, but I knew too that Cooper had picked him exactly because he would never. “Let’s cut our losses and send you home.”

He shot an icy green glare at me before looking away, arms still tightly crossed.

Cooper shifted in his seat, shooting a glance back over his shoulder at Santana, perched at the table behind us. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt anything to check.”

“It’s my money,” Kurt snapped, still not looking at me. “I’m the one who just handed it over to her like a fool. I want to check. And I will, whether you want to come with me or not.”

I stifled my groan in my coffee cup. _Can we go back to pretending?_ I wondered, I wished. The day or two of snatched moments, holding Kurt’s hand, trading jokes over goulash, acting like this was a vacation and not a job, I already missed it.

Mexico was so close, too close now. _I want more time_. Never before had I wanted a job _not_ to end.

Cooper bolted back his coffee and clanked the cup down on the glass tabletop. “Well, if your mind’s made up, your mind’s made up,” he said, much too casual. “But without Holly, you can’t get into those administrative offices. You’re definitely going to need a distraction to clear the joint so you can get into that back room.”

Kurt inclined his head. “You had something in mind?”

Behind me, I heard Santana’s Zippo flick on, the raspy rustle of a Sobranie being lit, the exhalation of a cloud of smoke. “Cool, it’s my turn,” she said, dragging her Louboutin-shod feet off of the arm of Cooper’s chair and setting them on the ground with a noisy clatter. “ _Finally_.”

***

In the distance, a stuffed duck toy exploded in a cloud of flames and dirt. Santana adjusted her safety goggles and let out a raspy chuckle before lighting another cigarette.

“She’s an artist with nitroglycerin,” Cooper yelled into Kurt’s ear as Santana gleefully depressed the plunger on her detonator. This time, the casualty was an enormous stuffed bunny and the other half of the hillside the duck had been perched on. “It’s kind of her thing.”

 _Boom_ , and there went a flock of fluffy pink chickens. Kurt’s black leather gloved hand tightened around the handle of his umbrella – it had begun to rain on our way to this deserted quarry, preparing to display Santana’s skills to their utmost. “I feel like I want to know more about her,” he breathed.

“Yeah,” Cooper and I said in stereo.

I watched as teddy bear limbs filled the air. “A few years ago, at the top of our smuggling game,” I said, leaning in close and trying not to get distracted by the scent of Kurt’s cologne, “she appeared. And we figure one day, well, she’ll just...disappear.”

Cooper handed Kurt a spyglass. “Check out the ink on the back of her neck,” he said, grinning like he wasn’t lying down in mud and destroying his suit. “A faded little wisp of personal information.”

It was in Chinese. She’d apparently gotten it at the height of the frankly appropriative Chinese character tattoo phrase. She hadn’t ever explained it, but one night in a Chinese restaurant in New York, Cooper had gotten a waiter to translate it for us.

“It basically says, _when you’re done with something, blow it up_ ,” I said now, wincing as Santana sent a group of Barbie dolls flying, dismembered plastic limbs jabbing down into the soft, wet ground like lawn darts.

Kurt lowered the spyglass, more disconcertingly excited than ever. “This is _so cool_.”

***

Back in my hotel room, deja vu shook me as I watched Santana demonstrate how to build a tiny bomb to Kurt. On their stomachs, feet in the air, it was like they’d just been transplanted from the deck of the boat, Kurt’s pinhole camera all that would be needed to complete the tableau. Instead, we had a large block of C-4 and a miniscule electrical circuit in a petri dish. Santana grabbed Kurt’s finger as he reached to touch the plastic explosive, and pushed it away, a stern, chastising frown on her face.

“The smoke detector we want is in this room here, at the top of the East Tower,” Cooper announced from his chair by the window, looking up at us and tapping at the map. “We’re going to plant and set off a tiny, tiny, _diminuto_ , Santana, _diminuto_ charge.”

With a put-upon sigh, Santana placed the petri dish bomb in the top of a teal leather handbag and pressed the plunger on her tiny remote detonator. A pop and a flash, and a cloud of smoke floated up towards the ceiling of the room. She looked at Cooper, smug and satisfied. Kurt looked nothing but delighted, hands over his mouth as he watched the smoke dissipate.

Cooper snapped his fingers to catch their attention. “Hey. Listen. Kurt, this is going to set off the detectors and incite a fire drill, boom, the office is empty. But you’re only going to have four and a half minutes to get through the access hatch, into the catacombs, grab the book if it’s there and get out before the fire brigade arrives.”

“The abort code, if you need it,” I chimed in, pouring myself another Scotch from the minibar I’d parked myself next to, “is corned beef. For some reason.”

Santana climbed down off the bed, setting her handbag and the backpack she used to carry her tools in on the couch. She snapped her fingers at Cooper and tilted her head to the door. He nodded. “Okay. We’re going to get dinner,” he said, rolling up the map. When he stood up, he stretched and yawned. “A quick dinner. You two better get some food and turn in early, okay? Big day tomorrow.”

“Yeah, big day,” I mumbled into my Scotch. Cooper made sure to give me a chastising nudge with his foot on the way out.

Santana had left the block of plastic out. Kurt wrapped it carefully in its brown paper and wandered over to the bags on the couch. “We should order in,” he said, bending to inspect the bags and giving me a great view of his backside, which today was wrapped in some kind of snug, stretchy trousers with black and white vertical stripes. They would have looked absurd on anyone else in the world. “I saw a _schnitzel_ dish that sounded nice, or maybe chicken paprika? And lots of fruit pastry for dessert.” He tapped his bottom lip with his index finger. “Let’s see, she’ll put the petri dish bomb in this blue bag, right?”

“That’s what it looked like to me,” I said, tilting my head to get a better look at the swell of his ass. It was such a _nice_ ass. The hand that wasn’t holding my drink wanted to touch it.

Kurt tucked the bundle of explosive into Santana’s backpack and came to sit on the floor with me. “Do you know how I feel right now?” he asked me, taking the Scotch from my hand. He took a sip and grimaced, setting the glass aside on an end table.

“Excited,” I guessed, remembering the way it had animated his face all day, from the moment of his revelation at the cafe through to Santana’s little explosives demonstration here. “Right?”

He sat still, looking at his hands folded in his lap. “No,” he said, as quiet and still as I had ever seen him. “Scared.”

It set me back. “Scared?”

“Surprised you, did I?” He looked up at me with a small, sad smile. “After all my big talk, all that showing off and swaggering around, but…” A deep breath lifted his shoulders. “It’s not a story, for all that I said. It’s real. It’s…” He grabbed my Scotch and took another wincing sip. “It’s freaky, it’s scary.”

I took the Scotch from him and set it on the other end table behind me, freeing his hands up so I could hold them in mine. “It’ll be okay, Kurt,” I told him, wanting to believe that nothing could go wrong with this insane scheme. “We all just have to focus. And you just remember all the stuff, second left, third right, four and a half minutes – ”

The kiss took my breath away, surprising and sweet and unexpected. He didn’t give me so much as a second to look in his eyes and change my mind, just lip to lip and the scent of his sandalwood cologne, his nose sliding alongside of mine. I let go of his hands and slid them up the back of his neck, letting my fingertips trace through the hair at the base of his skull, marveling at how baby duck down fine it was.

Kurt pulled away first, backing away on his butt across the carpet, eyes big and worried.

_Let him enjoy it._

_They’ve all been about you._

I pushed Cooper’s voice to the back of my head and shoved myself forward, scooting until I was face to face with Kurt once more. I had wanted a little more time to pretend, and I wanted him, and I didn’t want to hurt him again. Maybe I could make it so this one night would be the one thing he remembered of me and didn’t regret when this was all over.

Or was it the one thing I wouldn’t regret?

In either case, I reached for him in his ridiculous trousers and quaking nerves and blue-green eyed wonder and pulled him in for another kiss, easing him to the floor so that I could start the process of taking him to pieces for a few too-short hours.

So that we could pretend.


	9. Chapter 9

The sun rose over Prague, beaming gently through gauze curtains into our hotel room and over Kurt’s back, picking out little clusters of freckles I had never really guessed would stipple that pale, soft skin. Nor had I thought in depth about how his rear end and muscled back really were the inevitable end product of a conscientious workout regime, taut and firm and so much more than just an artfully sculpted rack for beautiful clothing.

Kurt slept, eyes closed so their blue depths were denied me, brown lashes fanned out over the lightly freckled cheeks that really should have been more of a clue. He didn’t snore in his sleep, thank goodness. He did, however, mumble strange things, little musical snips of hums and random words – _parsnips!_ he’d whisper-sung in the dark hours of the night, startling me awake. _Weimeraners!_

I didn’t want to wake him, but my little travel alarm had begun to beep, and in the bed, he began to stir, legs shifting against mine, little snuffling noises emerging before he buried his face in the pillow.

“Kurt,” I whispered, sorry to see our night of playing pretend end. “Kurt, wake up. It’s time.”

His head turned, face emerging from the pillow with eyes at half-mast and lips in a pout. “No.”

“Cooper’s going to let himself in here any minute now,” I warned. “You don’t want him to see you like this.”

Half of his face was buried in the pillow again, so I only saw one blue-green pool of mischief winking at me. “Are you sure about that?” he asked. “He’s pretty good looking, your brother. I’ve been meaning to ask if you two come as a matched – ”

I yanked the pillow out from under his head and beat him over the butt with it.

***

Within a few hours we were all clean and dressed and assembled in an abandoned attic with a good view of the East Tower and the museum entrance. It was a strange place, the attic, located as it was in a palatial stone residence that had been built in the 15th century. It had no windows, only large openings in the walls, and was full of Czech pigeons that were probably direct descendants of the pigeons that had inhabited this attic back when it was first built. They thronged the rafters, crapping and tootling around us. Kurt kept edging away any time he saw a pigeon land on a rafter near his head, drawing the voluminous expanse of his cape away with him.

Santana had already been to the East Tower this morning to deposit her explosive little payload and stood now twirling her pen-like detonator between her fingers. “Ready whenever,” she drawled now, plopping down in the broad seat-like expanse of the window opening’s sill. Coop stood next to her, binoculars in hand, watching the crowds and guards at the museum gates.

Finally, he nodded and pulled the binoculars away from his eyes, letting them dangle from his neck as he extracted a deck of playing cards from his pocket and began to shuffle them. “Okay,” he said. “It’s time.”

I glanced over at Kurt. I had been standing next to him, but he’d sidled away again, his eyes fixed on a pair of pigeons that seemed to be following him. “All right?” I asked him, edging over to fumble in his cape until I could find his hand and squeeze it. “You’re ready?”

A smile bloomed across his face, even as his hand shook in mine. “All right,” he repeated back at me, breathing in deep and tugging a black trilby not unlike Cooper’s down over his eyes. He was gone in a swirl of cape, trotting down the stairs to the ground floor, boot heels tapping away at the stone.

I let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding and turned around, only to find Santana behind me, smirking like anything. I nearly screamed; I hadn’t heard her walk up behind me. “What are you looking at?” I snapped, trying to convince my heart to start beating again.

She just kept smirking, bending down to pick up her bag and slip the detonator into a slender little pocket. As she turned away, she stuck her tongue out at me.

Whatever. I walked over to Cooper. “For the record, I’m still against this,” I informed him, waving off the playing card he was trying to show me. “I don’t get why we need to send him alone. I could have gone with him.”

“Right, because he’s not conspicuous enough as a very pretty American in expensive clothing and a goddamn _cape_ ,” Cooper replied, shuffling the deck again. “But yeah, okay, your objection is duly noted. And refuted: it’s important he does it alone. It’ll make him feel important, and then he’ll _be_ important, and nobody will bother him. Power of positive thinking, Squirt.”

I felt Santana rummaging in my jacket pocket, and slapped at her hand. I made contact, but not before she’d gotten her fingers on the empty condom wrapper that had landed in there during my night with Kurt. Her perpetual smirk gave way into a delighted grin as she held it up and realized what it was. “Oh, don’t even start,” I groaned, snatching the crumpled foil and turning away from her.

“Anyway. Worst case scenario, some file clerk finds him wandering around and asks him what he’s up to, which isn’t even going to happen, so quit worrying about him, Blaine.” Cooper put his cards away and squinted through the binoculars again, briefly this time before looking over at Santana. “Okay. He’s in position. Go, ‘Tana.”

Santana lifted up her blue leather handbag and –

– wait. Blue leather handbag?

Not...not her black backpack.

And she was pulling the detonator out and plunging it and –

 _Sh_ –

“Shit!” Cooper yelped, lurching back from the window as the East Tower exploded into a cloud of stone and smoke and flames, courtesy of the pound of plastic explosive that Kurt had safely stored in Santana’s backpack last night. I stared at the destruction, feeling a fool. Of course Santana wasn’t going to risk one of her precious leather bags, all wildly expensive and as carefully selected as Kurt’s hats, no, not even on the tiniest of smoke bombs, not when it would have to be left behind after the heist. I should have known. I should never, ever have assumed, and now…

“Kurt,” I howled, leaping towards the window opening and grabbing Cooper’s binoculars on the way. Grabbing Cooper, too, since I hadn’t bothered to unwind the strap from his neck. I ignored his strangled gurgles as I looked frantically for Kurt. “Where are you, where are you.”

It took only seconds to locate him – as Cooper had pointed out, he was fairly conspicuous in his hat and cape. He had turned around at the explosion and was facing our window, his hat pushed back so he could see. He was squinting into the sun and standing, arms spread, in the universal posture of _what the fuck do I do now?_

In another moment, he’d dropped his arms and was looking over his shoulder at the stone arches that were part of the entrance to the museum, watching as people streamed out of it in waves of screeching humanity. He looked back up at us, and, oh no, oh no, his damnable chin was going up into the air and –

“Don’t do it, don’t do it, no, no, don’t, Kurt, no,” I babbled, my knuckles aching from the tight grip I had on the binoculars. Beside me, my brother was turning a little violet from the lack of oxygen.

Kurt did it, of course. He turned on his heel and marched right into the museum, not so much as stumbling against any of the people rushing out in the opposite direction. I flung the binoculars away – now Cooper was going to have a bloody nose in addition to a few minutes of being addlebrained as he caught his breath, but who cared? – and hurled myself down the staircase, tripping and almost falling over my own feet as I made my futile way to the museum.

“Corned beef,” I shrieked as I crossed the plaza, hanging on to my hat. “Corned beef, corned beef, corned beef! Goddamn it, Kurt!”

The museum guards shut the pointed iron gates just as I ran up, gasping and stumbling. I leaped up on the gate and rattled it, watching in despair as the tail end of a black cape fluttered around a stone pillar and vanished. “Corned beef,” I whispered, not daring to look at any of the people who were staring at me like I was a lunatic.

“You have to get down off of the gate, sir,” one of the guards said, a young man with wide, uncertain eyes. “Please. You must get down. The police and the fire brigade are coming, we will have to let them in.”

Indeed, sirens were screaming already, coming closer every second. I unwrapped my fingers from the iron bars and hopped down, dejection dragging my shoulders low as I walked away, leaving Kurt alone, locked in a museum that would soon be crawling with soldiers, police, and firefighters, with no way out.

We were definitely far out of the realm of playing pretend now. As my brother and Santana ran up to me, I collapsed down onto the stone steps of the basilica and wished another fruitless wish for that remote island, and Kurt, and my unwritten life.

***

Thirty minutes later, we were all clinging to the iron railing that surrounded the museum. The place was swarming with law enforcement and fire officials. Mostly, to no one’s surprise, the shouting we heard was in Czech, but occasionally someone made announcements in other languages for the benefit of the tourists in the crowd. Thanks to this, we knew that the sprinklers had been triggered, but were turned off now, and that they had not found any strange American tourists roaming the museum. The museum was likely to be closed for the rest of the week for cleanup, but nothing had been damaged.

“That’s a relief, at least,” Cooper commented, hopping down from the fence. “Now if only Kurt could show up.”

“We didn’t exactly give him an escape plan, did we?” I retorted. “Hm? We didn’t plan on Santana using a different bag or, I don’t know, not cleaning up her dangerous toys herself before running off for dinner? Or hey, checking her bags for extra explosives? So how is he supposed to just show up, having magically become untrapped?”

“He’s not an idiot, for one thing.” Irritation sharp in his clear blue eyes, Cooper stalked back to look over me, jamming a finger into my chest as he pushed back his hat with his other hand. “He studied the same map we did, Blaine. Christ, I should have just pulled this job off on my own! The only difference you’re making is to worry about him all the time, which is _not your job_ , damn it.”

“I was happy in Mustique!” I yelled back, shoving him to get him out of my face. The push sent him stumbling back into Santana. “Why _didn’t_ you leave me there? Why did you have to – ”

“Idiots!”

Santana’s disgusted admonition was delivered with a pair of slaps to our heads, sharp ones that made Cooper and I both yelp and rub our scalps where they stung. Our hats had tumbled to the ground; Santana stooped down to pick them up and shoved them at us with a sneer on her face. “Jesus Christ, you’re like a pair of bickering kindergarteners. Can either one of you meatheads _think_ for a minute?”

I didn’t dare say a word, and from the look on his face, neither did Cooper. We just looked at Santana, waiting for her to speak. She did it so infrequently, when she did open her mouth it was generally worth hearing. Sharp, insulting, and painful, but with a core of logic and good sense underneath at least.

“Now, listen. I know Legolas the Elf in there is about as subtle as a mixtape full of Madonna songs, but I agree with Cooper. He’s not an idiot, Blaine.” Her glare made me feel even smaller than usual. “I’ve spent about as much time with him the last few weeks as you have. He’s a quick thinker with a lot of brain up in that couture-hatted head of his. He’ll figure something out. And by the way?” Another smack to my head. “I would have come back for my shit after dinner had the two of you not been locked up in your hot little nookie session. I waited for an hour, Blaine. You’re lucky I didn’t just jimmy the door open. Got it?”

My mouth was hanging open. I shut it, and covered my burning face with my free hand.

Santana turned to Cooper. “I admit that I should have checked the bags before placing the bomb this morning. My bad. But stop fucking giving your brother shit. You put a lot more on his shoulders than you think you did. You always do.”

He glared at her, but – wisely, I thought – kept his mouth shut.

“Now.” Santana turned and scanned the pandemonium. “We’re fine. _He’s_ fine. Apart from the cape and the hat, he’s dressed in a nicer version of what the clerks and docents I saw running around today are wearing. If they catch him, they’ll just think he’s a museum employee who went back for his things and got locked in the museum by accident. They’ll escort him out and he’s on his way.” But for the first time in her little diatribe, she faltered, biting her lip and chewing off a little of her bright red lipstick. “I mean, as long as he doesn’t do anything suspicious.”

It’s almost as if she could see Kurt at that moment, in the catacombs, Book of Hours safely tucked into a waterproof bag, his eyes fixed on a ventilation shaft in the wall.

“I got the grill off pretty quickly,” he told me later, eyes shining. “The screws were rusty, so really, all I had to do was pull it off and climb in. I mean, I thought it should have worked. I’d seen it in movies.”

Bag clenched in his teeth, Kurt had squeezed himself into the tin shaft and begun elbow crawling forward. It only occurred to him that this was a terrible idea when he heard the racket he was making. A racket that almost, but didn’t quite entirely drown out the chatter of the policemen and soldiers in the office outside of the copy room.

“I figured out that if I could hear them...well.” He blushed and looked down. “They could pretty much definitely hear me.”

They had.

“I might have tried to go on if the shaft hadn’t fallen apart under me right at that moment,” Kurt concluded. It had broken apart and sent him sliding out, tumbling head over heels into a pile of heavily armed personnel. Bag still clenched in his teeth, he had kicked a soldier in the chest before realizing how much danger he was in and put his hands up.

All this while Santana was telling us just how very fine he was, not in trouble at all, and not quite believing it herself.

Sirens caught our attention first, the discordant blare of several police cars not quite in sync. It was getting louder and louder and then – then there they were, a stream of white cars with blue-green stripes, _Policie_ picked out in black lettering. Kurt was in the fourth car back, his face lighting up as he saw us.

“It’s the chief of police,” Cooper breathed, yanking his hat back on and down over his face. “Christ, it’s the chief of police!”

The car Kurt was in slowed to a stop, putting the fear of God into us all. Had he fingered us as his accomplices? Or were they just stopping to let him say goodbye before they hauled him off to some Czech prison for the rest of his life? I held my breath as the police chief got out of the car and stood on the street cobbles, beckoning for Kurt to exit as well.

We heard enough of their conversation to know it was in Czech – would Kurt never stop amazing me with how he knew absolutely everything? – and the next thing we knew, the two men were shaking hands and bowing to each other, the police chief stepping back into the car and Kurt walking toward us. Slow, in no hurry, very casual.

He drew up alongside of us and waited before the police car had driven off before opening up his cape. Inside, tucked under his arm, was an antique looking book in brown leather binding, carefully stowed away in a waterproof bag.

We could only watch in amazement as Kurt pulled the bag out and did a victory dance in the streets of Prague, his laughter like music floating to the blue, blue sky.

***

“I have, as you know,” my brother said, downing his third glass of Czech wine, “quite literally sold ice to an Eskimo and sand to an Arab, and I still have no earthly idea what Kurt could have said to the police chief to have sweet talked his way out of that damn castle.”

The two of us were at the goulash place Kurt and I liked, sitting outside admiring the sunset. I was nursing my own glass of wine, but was still on my first glass and hadn’t really touched it. Santana walked up and threw herself into the chair next to mine, plucking the glass out of my hand and draining it.

Cooper grinned at her. “How’s our hero doing?”

“Asleep.” Santana raised her hand to gesture to the waiter. “I guess the excitement caught up to him. He said he’d order dinner later, if we didn’t bring him anything. I told him we’d get him something to go.”

“He likes the goulash here,” I murmured, toying with my fork. “I’ll order him some after we finish eating.”

“No problem, we have time,” Cooper said, checking his watch. “Train doesn’t leave until nine PM.”

I looked down at my own bowl of goulash. This, at least, I had managed to finish. “Actually, Coop, can you order it for me? I want to go for a walk.”

“Sure, Squirt. Everything okay?” He looked up at me as I got to my feet, surprise and concern mingling in his eyes.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s just…” I took in a deep breath, feeling it all the way down to my toes. “I mean, today was real. It was really real, it happened. It was completely insane and it all totally happened.”

Cooper’s smile was sun-bright and pure happiness. “Yeah. It totally did.”

I let a chuckle rumble warm in my chest. “Freaky, scary.”

***

There was a park not far from the bistro, a bucolic little clutch of green in this old stone city, and that’s where I headed, hands in my pockets and the world at my feet.

I thought about Kurt’s face, of the joy and relief and disbelief all at once. I’d felt like that once, very long ago, the first time Cooper and I pulled off a scam. Not that it had been much of a scam, just selling magic beans to a bunch of the other kids at the orphanage. Just milk money, and we’d ended up having to give it back when the kids rightfully complained. But for a minute there, when they bought the story, when they gave us their money in exchange for handfuls of dried navy beans – I’d felt what Kurt did this afternoon, that sense of bewildered achievement.

It was a type of euphoria I couldn’t remember feeling as an adult, and I wanted it back.

I edged down a steep paved path to a lower level of the park, and that’s when I saw it. A cart full of beautiful fresh produce, mostly apples of all different colors. A cheerful, thick-set fellow with a shock of blond hair was manning the cart, exchanging fruit and bottles of water for handfuls of coins. On a day like today, cool enough that a cape or jacket wasn’t uncomfortable, he was doing a surprisingly brisk business. But then he was wisely placed, at the bottom of this steep path, a welcome end to a not-very-easy walk.

One of the piles of apples was a bright, fresh green, brighter than grass. An apple from the pile above it had fallen down, a spot of deep red in all that green. That was it. That was the mark I was waiting for.

I sidled by when the cart was surrounded by a handful of people, all wanting to pay at once. The cart owner was flustered for a moment, and that’s when I struck, wandering by and casually lifting the red apple, no break in my stride. I waited until I was a few paces away to tuck it into my jacket pocket, and then I paused. You don’t want to flee the scene of the crime in a visible hurry, you have to be casual. I looked around, taking in the scenery.

The scenery which included a small boy I hadn’t previously spotted, standing by the man at the fruit cart, a miniature version of the proprietor.

Any hope I had of the boy saying nothing was quickly dashed when he lifted his arm and pointed straight at me. “ _Zloděj_!” he cried out, a look of perfectly justified righteous indignation on his face as he denounced me for what I was: a thief.

His presumed father started and looked around, his gaze falling on me, and I have always, always been bad at concealing guilt when I knew full well I was utterly in the wrong. The man let out what sounded like an epithet in Czech and picked up an apple, hurling it at me with a speed and accuracy that would have impressed Roger Clemens. I bolted down the next hill, not bothering with the paved path, just running hell for leather down a grassy hill spotted with wildflowers.

I leaped through groups of picknickers and tourists, leaving my blurry impression on more than one otherwise charming souvenir photograph. And as I ran, as I whooped and hollered, I felt it rising in me, the euphoria, the joy. I hadn’t at all successfully pulled off my heist, I could be caught any minute, but it was there all the same, lifting and pushing me over the grass. I was almost flying…

That’s when I tripped over a low stone wall and rolled the rest of the way down the hill.

Later, picking me up at the police station, the same police chief from that afternoon sighing at me, Cooper said, “An apple? We pull off the heist that never should have succeeded and you go ahead and get yourself arrested over a gee-dee apple?”

I reached up and slung an arm around his shoulders, clapping my hat on my head. “My dear brother,” I said, a long-forgotten spring in my step as we walked out the door, “it was part of an epiphany.”

On the train that night, speeding back to Italy, I was the one who raided the snack cart, and as I dumped the contents of my pillowcase over a joyous, laughing Kurt, as I kissed him breathless and slipped a rubber band-wrapped stack of cash into the pocket of his cape, I could almost believe that our pretend life had a snowball’s chance of being real.


	10. Chapter 10

“Mexico.”

The single word emerged from my brother in almost a growl, gritted out between his clenched teeth. He lifted the cigar in his hand to his mouth and puffed on it, brow furrowed as he watched the ocean in front of us.

We were back at sea, and now Mexico was very close indeed; we would be there by the end of the day. Santana was sunning herself on a deck chair, her skimpy red bikini attracting the attention of everyone on the boat, regardless of gender, a calculated gambit that had gotten her more than a few free drinks in the last two weeks. Kurt and I were sprawled out near her, and he was showing me how to make my own pinhole camera out of a hollowed out honeydew.

And Cooper was pacing the deck, cigar clenched in his teeth, tension in every line of his body.

Kurt looked up. “What about Mexico?” He’d kicked off one of his deck shoes and was letting his foot trace up and down my calf in a way I was trying not to find incredibly distracting.

Cooper kept his eyes on the Mexican coastline. “I don’t like that the dropoff is set here. Pockets of Mexico have become very dangerous in recent years, and this is one of them.” He turned to look down at Kurt, face sober. “This is a basic handoff. I want you to stay with Señorita Blanca, in your room. Stay low, stay quiet, stay careful.”

“But--” Kurt began to protest, only for my brother to swoop down in front of him in a crouch, eyes steely blue and deadly serious.

“Stay. In. Your. Room.”

Kurt was quiet for the rest of the journey, through disembarking and heading to the hotel, through checking in and dinner. It wasn’t until we were walking on the beach near bedtime that he finally said anything that wasn’t a simple yes or no or preference for white wine instead of red. “So I guess this is going to be dangerous. Tomorrow, I mean.”

I shrugged, unable to refute it. “Yeah.” Reaching down, I let my fingers intertwine with his. “I’ll be staying with Cooper in the beach house tonight. Try to sleep, if you can. You’ll worry less tomorrow if you have good sleep in you.”

He nodded, his face slightly absent. “I’ll try. Hey, Blaine?”

“Yeah?”

With a blink or two, he was back in the present and looking at me with a smile on his lips. “This is going to sound funny, but I’m really happy right now. Here, with you.” He squeezed my hand. “Danger and all. Are you?”

I pretended to think about it, but I knew my answer immediately. “Right now I am,” I said, pulling him close so I could nudge his shoulder with mine.

His smile brightened, lighting up his entire face, and he kissed me on the cheek. Letting my hand go, he moved off to waltz down the beach, kicking off his shoes so he could step into the lacy foam at the edge of the ocean and wiggle his toes.

Cooper walked up behind me, the crunch of his beach shoes in the sand my only alert before he spoke. “This is it, Blaine.”

I turned to look at him. He was watching Kurt, eyes fixed. “This is it,” he said again, softer now, a little sad. “The last night of our last con.” His eyes flicked to meet mine for an instant. “How do you feel?”

I knew the answer to this question right away too, but I didn’t answer him. I started watching Kurt again instead, listened to his joyous laughter as he splashed through the ocean tide.

When I turned around again, Cooper was gone.

***

I knew Kurt wouldn’t really sleep. He’d be too excited and worried to keep his eyes closed. So when I knocked on his hotel room door at half past midnight, I knew he’d answer fairly quickly, if cautiously. I wouldn’t catch him rumpled and half-dozing, in only his pajama bottoms...more’s the pity.

He answered as swiftly as I had expected, with a whispered, “Who is it?” and a moment for my reply before he opened the door. He wasn’t drowsy at all, but alert and blinking in confusion. “Blaine?”

I looked him over. He’d tried, at least; he was in his navy blue silk pajamas, the ones that were richly heavy and slipped over his limbs like water, the ones that brought out the deeper blues in his aquatic eyes and made his skin look like living marble. I’d seen him in these so many times over these last weeks. I was glad I would get to carry away one last memory of him in them. “Can you get dressed? In something simple, if you have it. I need you to come with me.”

Reaching out, he pulled me into the room. “What is it?”

I could only shake my head. “I need you to get dressed, to come with me. I have to tell you things. Well, show you things. Both.”

The bridge of his nose wrinkled as he frowned. “Now?”

“Please.”

He was mystified, I could see that, but he complied and even managed to find something simple to wear, soft cotton trousers and a long-sleeved t-shirt against the cool air of the beach at night. Slipping his feet into boat shoes, he followed me out of his room, the door clicking behind us with a sound I couldn’t help but read as ominous.

I took his hand and began to walk at a brisk trot, pulling him along behind me through the open air corridors of the hotel. “Blaine, please,” he said, trying to pull his hand away. I kept a tight grip. “You’re worrying me.”

 _Not for much longer_ , I thought, ignoring the way my heart wrenched. _Soon I won’t worry you or bother you or anything ever again_. I kept going, speeding up my pace a bit as I we emerged onto the beach patio of the hotel. The beach house that Cooper had rented wasn’t far, I could see the outline of it in the light of the moon. A few tiki torches were still lit to mark the pathway to its front door. I pulled Kurt, dragging him down into the sand, and that is when he quite literally dug in his heels.

“Goddamn it Blaine.” He yanked his hand out of mine, hissing a little. I could see it was splotched red from my grip before he cradled it to his chest in his other hand, and felt guilty. But his eyes, when they met mine, weren’t reproachful as I might have deserved. They were only concerned. “I’m not going another step until you tell me what’s bothering you.”

I knew he meant it, too. It had been a futile effort to try and outrun his stubbornness. I sighed. “Come on, Kurt, it’s just--”

“Not another step.” He dropped down to sit in the sand then, looking up at me, all over immovable expectation.

Well. Okay. I took a deep breath in through my nose. And another, for good measure, before finally spitting out, “Cooper and I are con artists.” Kurt’s only response was a puzzled frown, so I carried on. “Not smugglers, con artists. Really good ones, actually. Maybe some of the best.”

He kept frowning, not making the connection. I didn’t want to say it. I had no choice. “Every day, everything since you hit me with your Ferrari, it has all been a lie. A careful, scripted, calculated lie.” Comprehension began to dawn in his eyes as I finished it. “It’s a con, Kurt. And you were the mark.”

His mouth fell open. “I don’t believe you.”

My heart did a lurching somersault. “I’m sorry, Kurt. It’s true.”

“But…” He struggled up to his feet, brushing the sand from his trousers. “But you...we…”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, out of words and full of sorrow. I grabbed his hand again. “But it ends here. Come with me, please. Come. Cooper’s gone into town to get the actors ready. The Argentinians. We can go to the beach house and I can find his codes for his Swiss bank account. I’ll get you at least some of your money back, his share and mine. I can’t get you Holly’s or Santana’s, I’m sorry, it’s not enough--”

“Money?” His words came in fits and starts as we stumbled over hillocks of sand. “I don’t want the money, I don’t need it. We can go, Blaine, we can just go.”

“There’s no we,” I muttered, swallowing hard as tears began to sting my eyes. “I just want to get you out of here, Kurt. I want you gone and safe and to have salvaged something out of this.”

“But you can come with me, I don’t believe there’s nothing real between us Blaine, I don’t believe it for a minute.” Our feet clattered on the dry wood of the beach house stairs, and before I could open the louvered door, he grabbed my shoulders and turned me around to face him. His face was as open and sincere as I had ever seen it. “Please, Blaine. Let’s go. Wherever you want, right now, let’s go.”

I wanted to do it. God help me, I wanted that so badly. I closed my eyes against his pleading and opened the door of the little cottage, dragging him after me into the dark gloom of the living room. Moonlight spilled through the blinds half-open in every window, but it wasn’t helpful. I groped for a lamp. “The switch is here somewhere – ”

“At the base,” Cooper volunteered from a particularly inky pool of shadows.

I froze, my heart pounding in my ears. In another moment, Kurt had the lamp turned on and Cooper was cast into bright, sharp relief, clad all in white and sitting in a chair stained almost black. He had a gun pointed at the both of us. “Well, well. I’d say this is a surprise, but I’m not blind.” His mouth twitched into a sardonic half-smirk. “So, you told our little mark everything, did you, Blaine?”

Everything loosened up enough for me to take another breath. “Yeah. And now I’m going to get the codes from you so I can give him at least some of his money back, and I’m going to get him away from you. From you and me and this disgusting business.” My nerves sang with electricity, but suddenly I felt grounded, my feet firm on the floor and I could breathe more easily with every minute. “How does that make you feel?”

Cooper reached up to push his white Panama hat back. “Disappointed,” he said, his face dropping into mock sadness, complete with a pout.

“Not ending the way you planned it?” I asked, putting my chin up like I’d seen Kurt do so many times.

“As if that matters,” my brother scoffed, getting to his feet. “This is how it ends now. So I guess I might as well just get it over with. Right, Squirt?”

“Right,” I said, keeping my eye on his gun as it waved lazily between Kurt and me. “You can start by giving me the codes for your bank account in Geneva.”

“Nope,” Cooper replied, a broad sunbeam of a grin spreading across his face.

“Come on, Cooper.”

“I don’t want the money,” Kurt chimed in, voice wavering only a little. “It’s okay, Blaine.”

I spared him only the barest glance, not wanting to take my eye off of Cooper for too long. Kurt was white as a sheet behind me, fingers knotted and clutched together at his chest. “I’m getting you as much back as I can, Kurt.”

Cooper chuckled softly. “Come on, Squirt.” He shook his head. “Look, I’m sorry you fell in love with him, but he’s a mark. A pigeon. A patsy. That’s all he is.” Again, that parody of sadness. “Every moment, every kiss, it’s a con, it’s you playing the part of a man in love. And that’s what you’re most afraid of, isn’t it, Blaine? That you don’t know the difference...or maybe there is no difference. That that’s what love is, right?” Sadness gone, and the return of the insufferable smirk.

Kurt stepped forward, his hand coming to rest on my shoulder. “That’s enough,” he said, voice as steely as his eyes. “We’re leaving. Now.”

“You might be leaving, Kurt, but my brother won’t.” Cooper tilted his head to the side. “You’re too scared to leave, right, Blaine? Too scared to run off into the sunset, because real sunsets might be the most beautiful piece of art Mother Nature paints, but they turn into dark, uncertain nights. The kind of nights you lie awake during, wondering what’s real, what’s artifice, is it love? Is it a con?” He let out a soft laugh. “You’re not ready for that, Blaine. If you were, you wouldn’t be here right now.”

Kurt pulled at my shirt. “Blaine, please.”

“The codes are in my notebook,” Cooper said, eyes on me. “Sitting on the desk in the bedroom behind me. But come on, Squirt, it’s my story. In my story, you don’t get the money, or the sunset, or the guy.”

I hated him, then, in that moment. I hated him so much, his hold on my life, the way he smirked at Kurt, the way he was completely, absolutely, hatefully right. I hated the way he believed in my weakness so much, he put the gun down, set it on an end table as casual as putting down his wallet.

Kurt said my name one more time, but I hardly heard it over the roaring in my ears. I lurched forward out of his grasp, tackling Cooper to the floor. We both grunted as we hit, Cooper’s breath jolted out of him as he landed on his back right on the floorboards. He managed to get me in the stomach with his elbow, and I grunted as I reared back and punched him in the face for it.

Twenty of years of pent-up aggression I took out on my brother that night, giving as good as I got. I managed to hit him in the place on his ribs that still hurt when the weather was cool, and he bit his yelp back, the better to concentrate on socking me in the kidneys. Kurt tried to pull me off of Cooper, but I pushed him back, staggering up to my feet and dragging Cooper with me. But I was off balance, Kurt behind me pulling and Cooper trying to winch himself out of my grip, and I was trying to rear back and get him in the nose –

We stumbled, and hit the table, and the gun went off.

Cooper’s gun safety skills always had been a little lax.

Kurt stumbled back with a gasp, yanking me with him. Cooper fell back in the other direction, his right hand flat against his chest. “What?” he asked, pulling his hand away and blinking. Blood, red, red blood covered his fingers, was spreading across the left side of his white shirt. “What?”

“Coop.” I raced forward, catching him just as he fell back on the chair he’d started this mess in. “Jesus, Coop.”

He mustered a faltering grin. “Tastes like tinfoil,” he said, wonder in his voice. He slipped from my arms and hit the floor, his breathing labored.

“Coop!” I grabbed at him, yanking him into a hug, all anger gone. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it!”

Kurt stepped over, kneeling down next to me. “Blaine, my God.”

“Go, Kurt,” I said through clenched teeth. “Get out of here, please, for the love of God. Take the car and go. I’ll find a way to get you your money.”

“I don’t want the money,” he said, and I heard the exasperation at having to repeat himself. “Just you.”

“I can’t go anywhere now!” Cooper was shuddering in my arms, his breathing coming in gasps now. “Kurt, go!”

But he didn’t. He didn’t stand up, he didn’t leave. Instead he looked at me, and at my brother, his gaze drifting between us. Almost as if he wasn’t in full control of his actions, he reached out and gently, so gently, he separated us, pushing me back and out of the way. His long, slender fingers slipped buttons out of buttonholes on Cooper’s bloodstained shirt, and his hands spread the cloth open.

A bulletproof vest, and a rapidly emptying cackle bladder.

With the greatest dignity and not one word, Kurt rebuttoned my brother’s shirt and got to his feet. Without another look in our direction he turned and left, walking out of the beach house with his spine straight and his chin high. We watched him walk away, a slender, upright arrow that disappeared at the end of the pathway and melted into the shadows.

Santana emerged from the bedroom, omnipresent cigarette in hand. “Well?”

I got up, pulling Cooper after me. I made sure he was upright and steady on his feet before I landed a solid left hook right on his jaw, sending him sprawling to the floor. He gaped up at me in surprise as he rubbed the sore spot. “Blaine!”

“I let you have your speech,” I spat, fighting the urge to rub my aching knuckles. “Your big, grand monologue. You know why? So he’d believe every awful thing you said, so he’d never want to see me again. So he’d get the hell away from all of this for good.”

We had played the last of our pretend sunshine life. Kurt was gone, and I was left with the rest of it, just as I’d always known. He would live, and I would get through the aftermath the only way I knew how.

I left Cooper there on the floor of the beach house, he and Santana staring after me as I took off running. I had a tropical island to get back to, and the rum wasn’t going to drink itself.


	11. Chapter 11

It would be nice if I could say that I turned my back on all of it and slipped back into my idle island idyll a changed man.

I could tell you that I still shaved every day, that I kept my hair styled, that I went for daily walks on Mustique’s prettiest beach, that I ate three well-balanced meals a day and didn’t touch alcohol at all.

I could tell you that, but I would be lying. Not that you aren’t used to that, but in this case it would be particularly egregious.

So no, I wasn’t clean-shaven, neatly dressed, sober or even standing upright three months later when the rings holding the mosquito netting up around my hammock rattled, stirring me out of my lush’s half-stupor. I didn’t open my eyes. “Go ‘way, Cooper,” I mumbled, flinging my arm over my eyes.

“Cooper isn’t here right now,” said a heartbreakingly sweet voice with just a hint of a chuckle to it. A good push set my hammock swinging before the mosquito netting rattled again and Kurt disappeared out the door of my cabin.

***

“How’d you find me?” I demanded when I found him standing on the beach, hands in his pockets. He turned his head and smiled before returning his attention to the ocean.

“Santana,” he said, rocking back on his heels.

Oh, this again. But I knew better than to ask the obvious question, because Santana would never give up her secrets. So fine. “How’d you find Santana?”

A one-shouldered shrug. “She called me. We exchanged cell phone numbers in Mexico.”

That made me blink. “She has a cell phone?”

“I think she’s picky about who she hands the number out to.”

Talk about never giving up secrets. I sighed. “Okay. Whatever. Let’s go get breakfast.”

We ordered fruit and coffee and scrambled eggs, and it took two cups of a Colombian blend strong enough to put hair on my chest before I could finally get the most important question of all out. I rested my elbow on the tabletop, leaning my head on my hand and scratching through my wild mop of hair. I felt nothing so much as exhausted and bewildered. “Kurt,” I began, using my other hand to rub the bridge of my nose. “What the hell are you doing here?”

He started, a piece of cantaloupe falling off of his fork. “Oh,” he said, scraping the tines over his plate, tapping, scratching, twitching nervously. “Okay.” He drew in a breath, courage almost visibly gathering around his shoulders as he dug in the pocket of his white linen trousers. Whatever he pulled out stayed clenched in his hand as he continued. “I’ve had a lot of time, you know, these last three months. For thinking, and arranging, and…” He stretched his clenched fist across the table and dropped a crumpled little bundle of white next to my coffee cup. “I want you to seriously consider this.”

When I unfolded the little flag, it was as expertly hand-sewn and embellished as the one I’d shown Cooper on the train forever ago. The text differed slightly, though. _Kurt Hummel, Con Artiste_ , it said in the same perfectly placed Swarovski crystals.

I raised an eyebrow when I looked up at him, and he beamed a smile at me. “Well, there was the whole entire back of Santana’s shirt left for me to play with.”

I allowed sunlight to glitter off of the words for only a moment before folding the cloth neatly and passing it back across the table. “Go away, Kurt.” I watched him flinch back and I had to turn my face away. “Just go, please. Everything Cooper said in Mexico, it’s true. You know it is. I was playing you as a mark. That’s all you ever were.”

Not an opportunity to play pretend, not a few moments of sunshine I wanted so badly to be forever...

“Everything between us,” I went on, still not able to look at him as I told the biggest lie of my life, “none of it was real, Kurt.”

Silence, broken only by the ocean, and then the little bench he was sitting on scraped back and before I knew it he was on my bench, with me, too close. He grabbed my hand before I could react beyond staring at him in shock. “I don’t believe you,” he said, calm and serene, brow smooth. “Besides, I don’t have anywhere to go.”

I stayed there, still and startled, as he told me all about how he’d gone around his house, that enormous, eccentric house full of his hobbies and memories. How he’d placed tiny but lethal C-4 bombs in nooks and crannies, just an enormous network of miniature, painstakingly crafted explosives. How he’d stood outside with the silver pen detonator Santana had given him as a gift, how he had drawn in a deep breath and pushed the plunger and sent his entire life up in flames.

I remembered the beautiful dresses, the hat collection, the incredible stereo, all of his photographs and the sight of him grinning at me from atop an improbably tall unicycle with running chainsaws in each hand, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Kurt held my hand with one of his and ran the fingers of the other over the back of mine. “If I’m telling my own story,” he said, “then I don’t need to be tied to the volumes that preceded me.”

He was so beautiful, and so brave, and so utterly confounding. It had taken me years to walk away from Cooper, I still wasn’t convinced I had done it, and here was Kurt, walking away from everything he’d ever known with a resolve I wished I knew how to harness for myself.

I looked at him, sitting perched on the edge of the bench like a bird ready to take flight, only his grip on my hand keeping him grounded. “What are you doing, Kurt?”

Leaning forward, he cupped my face in his hands and pulled me close, noses touching for an instant before he moved in and kissed me, sweetly, slowly, as if he were savoring every second. His mouth was sweet with the fruit he’d eaten and he kissed me with a confidence that was something like contagious, sending breathless adrenaline singing through my blood. Satisfied at last, he pulled back, still holding my face like a blown-hollow egg.

“I have an idea,” he told me.

***

I had Cooper and Santana on the island within a day.

“You have to admire the craftsmanship,” Cooper mused, holding the tiny flag in one hand and tracing its sparkling rainbow declaration with the tip of a finger. “You don’t see this level of expertise and care much these days.”

 _Deja vu_. I yanked the flag out of his hand. “You knew he’d come back,” I spat, shoving the soft cloth into the breast pocket inside my jacket. And damn it, there was that damn wad of cash again, slipped in god knew when. “What’d you figure he was good for, another million?”

Cooper flicked the brim of his trilby back and winked at me before pulling a deck of cards out. “One point seven five.”

Clearly my punch to his perfect jaw hadn’t made the desired impression.

My brother’s half-smile faded as he watched me clenching my hands into and out of fists. “God, Squirt. Of course he came back. He never got what he wanted.” He let out a tiny snort, shuffling the cards. I didn’t even bother shaking my head when he held up a king of clubs. With a shrug, he curved the card deck with his fingers and smiled at the rude noise they made as he shot them into the ocean. “Neither did you.”

I could have cheerfully, happily strangled him and shoved his body down off the cliff we were standing on. But I needed him, God help me, I needed him. “You’re going to end this,” I informed him, stepping forward and jabbing my finger hard into his chest. “You built this goddamn globe-trotting fairytale from the ground up, well, you can hammer in the last nail, Cooper.” He held up his hands and started trying to back up, but I followed him, still jabbing at him. “And you had better make it good, make it _final_ , so he’s done, you got it? Done with us, with me, this whole shitty thing, and make it so he doesn’t want to start back up ever again.” I dropped my hand so I could rub the back of my neck. A headache was blooming at the base of my skull, the kind I only ever got around my brother. “Finish it, Cooper.”

His stare was inscrutable. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

I breathed in the cool salt air of the ocean, taking it into my lungs, letting it clear my head. “I love him, Cooper,” I said, turning away to tilt my face to the sun. “I don’t want to turn him into me.”

I could feel him watching me for a moment before he sighed and slung an arm around my shoulder. “Okay, Blaine,” he said, pulling me around so we could head back to where we’d left Kurt and Santana blowing up small soft toys they’d bought from a beach vendor. “Let’s go have a drink and discuss it.”

***

We were all gathered around a table in a nasty little tavern tucked out of the eye of the civilized population of Mustique. Kurt frowned at a smudge on his Doc Martens, but seemed to lose the urge to wipe it off when he and his handkerchief got too close a look at the floor. With a scowl, Santana snatched Cooper’s suit jacket right off of his back and put it down on a chair seat before she would trust her McQueen-clad ass down in it. The speculative look in her eyes as she caught sight of her shoes made me think she was probably going to burn her Louboutins without a shred of remorse before we left the island. I didn’t blame her. I was keeping my hat on not just to disguise my island bed-head, but also because there wasn’t a surface in this place I felt safe setting it down on.

Apart from the protest at his jacket being stolen, Cooper seemed completely unperturbed by our sleazy, slimy surroundings. He brought a round of highball glasses to the table. “Oh, it’s just rum,” he snapped when he saw the looks on our faces. “The glasses look mostly clean, the alcohol will kill anything else.”

“Can we go get actual drinks when we leave here?” Kurt whispered into my ear. “Something straight from a bottle we open ourselves, maybe?”

Sounded like a plan to me.

Cooper sighed as the three of us failed utterly to pick up our drinks. “Fine,” he said, picking up one of the glasses and belting back a good shot. “Okay. Let’s just dive right in, shall we?”

“Yes.” Kurt leaned forward – as much to get his olive green jacquard jacket away from the back of the couch we were on as to better listen to Cooper, I was sure. “What’s the plan?”

“Well, the plan is to make money,” Cooper said, leaning against the back of his chair and making Santana grimace as his white shirt touched it. “Which we badly need. We’re going to have to liquidate the assets from our last job before we can move forward.”

Kurt chuckled, tugging at the knot in his vividly purple tie. “Um, you all still have my money from the last job. Even Blaine.” His wink to me let me know I was quite undeservedly forgiven for my lazy selfishness. “So…”

“That’s profit, not capital,” Cooper replied, his easy shit-eating grin firmly in place. “And it’s already split between us and Holly, busy making baby profits in various global tax shelter bank accounts, not easily accessible. Which leaves us with only one option: to sell the book of hours.” He belted back a second gulp of rum.

Kurt had a grin on that was easily as shit-eating as Cooper’s. “Oh! Right. The one you told me was fake.”

Dropping his glass on the tray with a clunk, Cooper spread out his hands in mock helplessness. “What can I say? You’re too good, Kurt. With all your random knowledge, we couldn’t take a chance on an actual fake.” But then an uncertainty I rarely ever saw flitted across his face, just a split second of worry before he leaned forward and picked up a second glass of the rum. It was gone after he took a long drink, replaced by his smile. “We’ll have to go deep, deep black market to get top value on it, though, and there’s only one place deep enough for that. And only one person we know exists who can get us the in that we need in St. Petersburg’s art fencing network.”

 _Oh, no_. I closed my eyes, Kurt’s mouth fell open, and Santana facepalmed, but we all three of us still managed to say the name in unison anyway. “Holly.”

“Hello, gang,” came the bright, familiar voice from over our heads, right before Holly plopped into Cooper’s lap. “Whose idea was _this_ place? Talk about tetanus city.”

Cooper smiled, and even somehow managed to look slightly embarrassed. “Right. So. Let’s start with adjourning to my hotel room and forging ourselves some Russian travel paperwork, hm?”

***

“I don’t like it,” I told Cooper later, when everyone else had gone to bed. “I don’t like the combination of St. Petersburg’s seedy underbelly and Holly. Prague was one thing, we weren’t getting criminals involved. You and Holly and criminals are a bad, bad combination.”

“We’re criminals, or had you forgotten that just because we have dashing wardrobes and innocent faces?” Cooper asked, carefully sealing the pages of the Austrian passport he was making for Kurt. He looked up and flashed me a grin. “Okay, okay, wipe the look off your face. I know what you mean, Squirt, but what else do you want me to do on short notice? The book is what we have, and Holly _is_ our connection to the art underground in basically every European city.”

“So this is my fault,” I grumbled, sipping a room service gin and tonic out of a mercifully spotless glass.

“Well, you’re the one who called me.” Again that flash of a smile. “You always did worry too much, Blaine. Go to bed. You only have a few more days with Kurt if this works out the way you intend it to. Besides, all that hammock sleeping’s wreaked havoc on your posture, you need a real bed for a night.”

I still didn’t like the idea, but I had to trust my brother to do the good work he’d always done so that I could give Kurt some semblance of a life back. Saluting him with my drink, I wandered out, definitely feeling ready to curl myself around Kurt’s sleeping body and let the rhythm of his breathing soothe me into something like sleep.


	12. Chapter 12

It took five days, all of us traveling separately through different European cities, carrying passports of different nationalities, so that we could arrive in St. Petersburg without raising any suspicion. It made me nervous, having Kurt travel alone. It was one thing for him to find me in Mustique, entirely another for him to roam alone in St. Petersburg. 

Naturally, he loved it. He spent three days luxuriating in the punishing Russian steam baths, the _banya_ , eating caviar, visiting tea rooms, and buying silver samovars to ship to Chandler for storage before I caught up with him. Santana and Cooper had arrived first, and had been spending their free time in fine-tuning the plan before Holly got to town, so Kurt had been left to his own delighted devices. 

I was fighting off jet lag, frowning at bright sunlight at ten PM while Kurt cheerfully ordered dinner. “You’re going to love the caviar potatoes,” he told me, lifting the menu to hide him reaching across the table to grab my hand for a quick squeeze. “And the Veal Orloff, oh, I have all these ethical issues about veal, but my god, Blaine, I’ve put on ten pounds since I got here, I swear.” 

“You look fine to me,” I mumbled, sleepy, half-crazed at the lack of sunset at this hour, worried about the plan Cooper was going to present to me in an hour and a half, upset about having to leave Kurt for good in a couple of days even though I was sure it was the right thing to do. “I’m sure it’s all good. Order whatever.” 

“Blaine.” He clearly wanted to hold my hand longer, but Russian laws weren’t friendly to people like us, so he withdrew, setting the menu aside. “What’s the matter?” 

“Nothing.” _Everything_. “I’m just tired, and I never liked white nights. Can’t get used to all the sun all the time. Thank god for blackout curtains, I’m going to sleep like a log.” 

He ducked his head as the waiter went by. “I wish I could sleep with you,” he whispered, a hint of wistfulness in the thread of words. “I sleep better with you there.” 

I focused my attention on my water glass as casually as I could. “I do, too,” I told him. “On both counts.” I didn’t think I actually would sleep like a log tonight, or ever again. I was going to miss him so much. I looked at him now, fixing the sight of him in my mind, his broad shoulders, his trim waist, the rhinoceros head brooch affixed to the lapel of his black jacket. I knew under the table he was wearing perfectly tailored trousers with a pattern of sepia-toned zebra heads scattered across the fabric. Under the jacket he had on one of those vests he wore so beautifully, soft and snug over his beige Oxford shirt. His hair was, as ever, swept away from his high forehead and his eyes were bright and hopeful and looking forward to what he thought of as “our Russian caper”. 

He was a dream, a beautiful, intense dream I’d been fortunate enough to experience over what barely amounted to _maybe_ two months, when I thought about it. Not even that long. 

I blinked, and the reverse image of him smiling at me was branded on the back of my eyelids. 

Only two days left. I wanted to make them as enjoyable as possible. Lifting my menu, I fixed a smile on my face and leaned across the table to grab his hand. “Tell me about these caviar potatoes.” 

***

 

After dinner, I sent Kurt back to his hotel room. “I need to walk off all that veal,” I told him, patting my stomach and making an exaggerated face to telegraph my fullness as we stood outside of his hotel. “Go get some sleep, or go take a swim. You’ve got a big day coming.” He was our point, of course, the person who would meet Holly with her “Russians” and make the book trade for the cash. 

“So have you,” he countered, mouth twisted into that skeptical _moue_ he liked to make. 

“Not as big as you. Besides, I haven’t seen Cooper and Santana yet. I need to go find their hotel and check in with them.” I wanted to kiss him goodnight, but didn’t dare. “Let’s have breakfast in the morning.” 

Kurt’s face lit up. “Tvorog blini!” 

Another memory to file away. I grinned back at him. “I bet it’s great. See you at 8?” 

With a wave and a nod, he set off up the hotel steps. I waited until he’d disappeared through the doors before turning and heading off towards my meeting point with Cooper and Santana. 

This bar Cooper had chosen here was much cleaner than the one in Mustique had been. I found him and Santana in a back booth, she sipping a martini, and he ignoring his vodka with lemon in favor of sketching in his notebook. Santana kicked him under the table when she spotted my approach, and Cooper looked up. “Blaine! How was your flight, how was dinner?” 

“It’s all good.” I dropped in next to Santana and signaled to a surly waiter, pointing to Cooper’s drink and holding up one finger. “I don’t think I’m ever going to enjoy flying Aeroflot, but the in-flight movies are always interesting. It was the latest _Hobbit_ movie, this time.” When Santana snickered, I poked her in the leg and silenced her with a glare. “I don’t think I’d have understood what was happening even if it hadn’t been dubbed into Russian.” 

“That’s because you never read the books like I told you to.” Rubbing at a section of his drawing with his finger, Cooper waited for the waiter to drop off my drink before turning the notebook to face us. “So. Let’s talk about the plan.” 

I shuddered to see what he’d drawn. The boxy little body of the Lada Santana had purchased – cash – on our arrival was sketched in against the backdrop of a looming, industrial looking building. Tiny figures to represent Cooper, Santana and I were drawn in as walking away from it. “Okay, so ‘Tana’s wired the back windshield and put a big charge in the engine. After Kurt does the handoff, we all pile in and drive out of town. That night, we stop at a gas station.” He flipped the page, and if I had thought the first drawing chilled my blood, the second one froze it solid. Now the Lada was riddled with bulletholes and in the process of exploding, and our tiny sketched bodies were stretched on the ground. “That’s where the “Russians” doublecross us and we all die. All of us.” He looked directly at me, eyes steady. “Blaine, you take a bullet so Kurt can escape. The guys won’t touch him. You die and he runs. And that’s it.” He flipped the book closed and finally took a long sip of his drink. “The end.” 

Nothing, not a single thing about this was real. You knew that, right? That the book of hours really was fake, that Kurt was going to receive from Holly a suitcase full of fake rubles that Cooper had delivered to her this morning. Her “Russian art expert” was real enough, or at least, it was a museum guard she knew who’d worked at the Hermitage for so long, he knew exactly what to say to “validate” the book. And then, of course, we weren’t really going to die, but it would be the only way to make Kurt go and never, ever come back. Much like his home, there would be nothing left to come back to. 

Cooper had really outdone himself this time. Even with my misgivings, I had to admit that. Swallowing down my doubt and fear, I nodded at my brother. “Okay.” 

“Good.” Cooper got to his feet, grabbing his hat and notebook. “I’ll head back. You two finish up your drinks, I’ve already paid the tab.” He winked and started off, melting quickly into the crowd. I got up and moved into the side of the booth he’d vacated. 

Across from me, Santana, was toying with the toothpick in her martini, swirling the olives through the pool of gin and vermouth in the bottom of her nearly empty glass. “You’ve been quiet,” I remarked, sipping at my own drink. 

She looked up at me, her head covered by the hood of the coat she liked so well, even though it was summertime in St. Petersburg. It gave me chills, she looked like a painting of a witch with bad news to deliver, eyes dark and uncertain, the hood of her cloak drooping around her face and shoulders and casting her in shadow. Her teeth were white as she bit at her blood-red bottom lip. 

I couldn’t look at her anymore without shivers going to down my spine. I turned in the booth so my back was against the side wall and kicked my feet up across the rest of the seat. My eyes were closed as I leaned my head back. “I’m doing this for Kurt, you know,” I said to her. 

A whisper of cloth on leather and by the time I opened my eyes, she had vanished, but her uncertainty remained behind, hovering in the air like poison gas. 

***

The dropoff took place in Kurt’s hotel room. Cooper had wired it so that we could listen in from my room on the next floor up. “You got it?” Holly asked, a scraping sound letting us know she was pulling a chair out from the table by the window where Kurt and I had eaten pancakes and drunk dark coffee not two hours before. 

Kurt’s voice was almost entirely steady, only a thread of shaking around the edges. “Here,” he said, the susurration of leather alerting us to the book of hours, wrapped in a length of soft leather, being pushed across the table’s surface. A grunt from Holly’s “expert.” 

“It is in good condition,” he grumbled, turning pages slowly, with apparent care. “Almost perfect, despite being dragged all over creation…! But see, here.” We heard Holly and Kurt’s chairs creak, perhaps they were leaning across the table to see whatever the man was indicating. “The color, the gold leaf here, so spectacular. Only slight foxing on the page corners, a miracle. And the cover!” There was a soft _floof_ , as if a book were closed. “Missing only one or two pearls, a gold stud perhaps. The emeralds are real and intact.”

“So you’ll take it?” Kurt asked, and I could hear him trying not to sound too eager. 

“ _Da_.” A large thump sounded, perhaps that of a briefcase full of counterfeit rubles. “It is in good condition, someone will want it, someone big.” The man chuckled. “I will find a fool. It will be worth it.” 

Clicks, like locks being thumbed open, and the creak of hinges. I could picture Kurt’s fingers moving over the stacks of rubles, flicking through the paper, counting how many were in a stack, how many stacks there were. I could see the little crease at the bridge of his nose as he frowned and calculated the exchange rate. 

“That will do,” he finally said, and we heard the hinges creak, the locks click. “ _Spasibo_.” 

“ _Pozhaluysta_ ,” croaked the old man. Chairs scraped back from the table, footsteps on carpet. “Enjoy the rest of your stay, young man.” 

Two small sounds that might have been Holly kissing Kurt on each cheek. “Have fun, Kurt. Say hi to the gang. Be careful.” 

“You too,” He said, and I knew he was blushing with suppressed pride and joy at having pulled all of this off. “Have a great day.” 

The door of his room clicked as he opened it, and clicked again as he shut it behind Holly and her “expert”. Cooper thrust me back down into my chair with a hand as I began to lift myself to my feet. “Wait,” he warned. “Give them time to get out of the hotel and down the block. Kurt has to think we’re waiting for them to be well out of reach before you two check out of your rooms and we leave.” 

The hardest ten minutes of my life were the ones spent listening to Kurt potter around his hotel room, humming softly, unzipping his suitcases and repacking them. I heard him chuckle once – he must have found the rubber banded bundle of cash I’d slipped into his toiletry bag while he let room service in to deliver our breakfast. At last, he sat heavily down on the bed, making the springs squeak, and let out a big sigh. 

“Okay, go,” Cooper said, but I was already out of the chair, headed through the door Santana yanked open for me. I didn’t bother with the rickety elevator but took the stairs two at a time and walked briskly down the hall to rap on Kurt’s door. 

A hand reached out and grabbed me by my necktie, yanking me into the room and, once the door was firmly closed, into a kiss that left me breathless before he let me go. “Did you hear that? Did you hear all of it?” he asked me, bouncing in place with his hands clasped under his chin. “I did it! I was very cool, very calm, it was so smooth, Blaine, Holly winked at me for being so smooth.” 

His delight was contagious, I couldn’t help but laugh with him. “We heard it all, yes. You did great, Kurt. A really good job.” He reached for me to pull me in to another kiss, but I had to hold him off. “Hold that thought a second.” 

Walking over to the bedside lamp, I examined it from top to bottom until I found the tiny wireless microphone I was looking for. Kurt’s face was a picture in astonishment as I carried it into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet. “I thought Cooper had hidden it in the flowers,” he said, gesturing to an arrangement of lilies on the desk. 

“Too obvious,” I said, coming back into the room and grabbing him. It was my turn to leave him breathless, speechless, thoughtless as I kissed him, feeling him melt under my hands as his knees weakened. This, too, I sealed in my memory, the warmth of his mouth, the softness of everything he wore, the strong muscles under his clothing, the happy little breathing hums as I kissed him and kissed him. 

I disengaged with reluctance. “Are you ready to hit the road?” 

“Sure,” Kurt said, bending to pick up his bags. “Where are we going?” 

 _The end of the line_ , I thought, but what I said was, “Helsinki. I think you’d really enjoy the sauna experience.” 

***

 

In the car pointed towards the border between Russia and Finland, safe with my brother and Santana, we could be more like ourselves. Together in the back seat of the tiny blue Lada, we held hands, me watching Kurt as he marveled at the passing Russian scenery. While he was distracted, I slipped the money he’d snuck into my pocket that morning back into his satchel at our feet. I was determined that he would end up with it. He’d blown up his home, while I had bank accounts around the world; I was about to “die” and he was about to escape this life. He’d need the cash for a plane ticket out of an airport he’d need to find and get to, at least. 

Santana drove, and Cooper in the passenger’s seat fiddled with a deck of cards. Occasionally he turned to show me a card. He was always wrong. 

The road stretched out before us, and my lack of sleep started to catch up to me as I watched the hypnotic paved ribbon. On my third yawn, Kurt reached over and tugged me down so that my head rested in his lap. He tugged out one of the lapels of his cape and draped it over me. I felt his fingers comb through my hair. “So soft,” he murmured, a smile in his voice. I could only smile back. Warm and loved and comforted, with my impending sadness temporarily at bay, I drifted off with my cheek pressed into the fabric of his trousers. 

The first bullet pinged through the back window of the Lada maybe thirty minutes later. 

My eyes flew open, but Kurt pinned me down. I could only look up to see my brother, who looked very, very surprised indeed. “What…?” he asked, just before a second bullet made Kurt duck down over me. Cooper lurched aside to avoid it, as did Santana. But she was the one driving, and her lurch took the car with it, sending it over into the next lane and back again as she shrieked, only just avoiding a collision with a large oncoming truck. 

“No, I don’t know what the hell is going on!” Cooper was shouting as Santana used one hand to steer the car and the other to slap hard at his shoulder and face, anywhere she could make contact. Kurt huddled over me as the window on my side of the car blew out, and then it was chaos, hell on earth as automatic guns loaded the car with bullets. The windows shattered, and Santana was forced to drive while ducked so far down into her seat she could barely see over the dash. I fought my way out of Kurt’s grasp enough to sit up for a split second and see a menacing black car behind us, one man leaning out of the passenger window with a very large gun pointed our way. 

I let Kurt pull me back down as Santana swerved all over the road, desperately trying to avoid more bullets. Cooper was shouting, shouting, pulling out his cell phone and punching numbers into it, then shouting at whoever answered. “Holly! Damn it! What the hell is going on?” 

Santana was doing her best, and the bullets weren’t hitting any of us in the car, but even she couldn’t keep the car on the road when the men pulled up alongside of us and shot out the two passenger side tires. We swerved across the roadway, our screams filling the air as Santana punched through a barrier – and then went over a hill. 

The car lifted into the air then, lifted and rolled in the air while I clung to Kurt and he clung to the back of Santana’s seat and Santana clung to the steering wheel and my brother stopped screaming, his eyes wide and mouth open in a silent yell as he braced his hands against the roof of the car. 

We landed upright, and the car kept rolling. There was a wooded area we seemed to be pointed towards, and Santana had lost control entirely, no amount of hitting the brakes or wrenching at the steering wheel was doing her any good. The ailing Lada rumbled through the forest, galumphing on two wheels that fortunately kept the speed down to something that might not kill us when we inevitably collided with something. 

We saw the tree a moment before the Lada’s grill wrapped around it, bringing us to a merciful stop. It was such a mild collision that the front of the car was the only casualty -- the steering column didn’t crush Santana, the engine block didn’t come through the dashboard to flatten Cooper. For a moment, we could breathe, settle our nerves for just a second before we knew we’d have to get out of the car and start running. 

A sparking at Cooper’s knee caught our attention. Santana’s eyes were the first to widen in realization. “Out!” she screamed, reaching across Cooper to open his door and shove him out into the grass. “Get the hell out!” 

I scrambled out of the car, dragging Kurt after me, almost tripping over Cooper. But we weren’t fast enough. The charge Santana had loaded under the hood of the Lada went off before we were far enough away. The concussion of the blast sent Kurt and I flying, and after my head hit the trunk of a tree that was too close, everything went black.


	13. Chapter 13

“Blaine? Blaine!” 

I came to amidst smoke and fire and rain and Kurt’s hands on my face. His eyes flooded with relief as I blinked and focused on him. “What happened?” 

“You’re okay?” he asked, with some urgency as his fingers brushed my damp hair back from my face. “How does your head feel?” 

“Like I hit a tree with it,” I replied, not wanting to examine what I was sure was a lump at the back of my head. It already hurt, touching it wouldn’t help. I wanted a hot shower, two aspirin, and a Scotch. I glanced around at the little wooded clearing, trying to make sense of what had happened. The Lada, less a car and more a metal block of Swiss cheese, smoldered nearby. And then it hit me. “Cooper!” 

My brother wasn’t there, not anywhere, not near the car, not laid out where Kurt and I had nearly tripped over him. I looked around in panic, waiting for him to emerge from the trees with his big grin on his face and an explanation for what had just happened. But there was nothing, not even his hat. I stumbled up to my feet and towards the car, looking for any kind of clue. 

All I found were bulletholes, Cooper’s notebook, and Kurt’s bag. I pulled the bag out and handed it to him, keeping the notebook for myself. “Do you know what’s going on? Where did Cooper go?” 

Kurt clutched his bag to his chest, looking every inch the bearer of bad news. “Well, um, I blacked out for a little bit, but only a minute, I think from the shock? But I heard voices, Blaine, they came through here and I kept my eyes closed and my breathing even so they wouldn’t think I was conscious. I think they took Cooper, Blaine. I heard him groaning, and I heard them dragging something away and I think it was him. I bet they’ll want money. I can help you with that, we can get the ransom and get him back.” 

It was too much in my injured, frantic state. I waved at him to stop speaking and took in several long, deep breaths of the damp and smoky air to calm myself. I stopped when I started to get dizzy. Cradling my head in my hands, I peered through my fingers at Kurt. “What ransom? Who got him, Kurt?” 

He blinked at me. “Well, I think the Russians got him, Blaine. I think we were doublecrossed.” 

Steps crunched behind us and I whirled, hoping against hope – but it was Santana, preceded by the strong beam of a flashlight. She clicked it off and reached up to tilt her broad-brimmed black hat back away from her face, so that there was nothing to conceal her grief and concern and the flat message that my brother was in deep, deep trouble. 

*** 

My fingers fumbled, dropping bullets all over the carpet of the hotel room we were hiding in. I wasn’t used to loading a gun at all, much less when I was shaking and terrified. But I didn’t know what else to do while we waited for some word, any word, some direction to be pointed in so we could _do_ something. Go somewhere. Get Cooper. 

Brass slipped through my fingers. “Come on, Coop. Call me, something, anything, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to handle this, please, come fix it…” 

Kurt was by the window, peering through the curtains. “There she is. She’s got a car. Let’s go, Blaine.” He came to kneel by me, picking up bullets and helping me load them into my tiny, useless pistol. His smile, taut as it was, still tried to be reassuring. “Come on, Blaine. We’ll get this done. It’s going to work out.” 

He’d taken charge as soon as Santana and I had realized that Cooper was really, really gone. He’d used his cape to flag down a passing car and all his considerable charm plus the rubber banded bundle of cash to get the alarmed driver to take us back to St. Petersburg. Once in the city, he got us a hotel room, wrestled me into the shower and sent Santana off to find us new transportation. 

All I could do was fruitlessly try to load my stupid, hardly-used gun, flip through the sodden pages of Cooper’s notebook, and hope, hope, hope that he would call. 

Kurt got my gun sorted out and clicked the safety on, slipping it into my coat pocket. “Come on, Blaine, please. Santana’s waiting. We have to figure out our next steps.” 

She’d parked at the farthest reaches of the hotel’s lot and was leaning against the car’s door as we approached, her hat pulled down over her face. I felt my steps quickening as we got close. “If you have any idea what’s going on,” I called, hating how my voice trembled, “now would be a _spectacular_ time for you to speak up.” 

The look on her face when she lifted her head and stepped to meet us halfway said more than she ever had in the time that I’d known her. Swallowing hard, she extended her right hand, and my stomach dropped to my feet. 

 _And we figure one day she’ll just...disappear_ , I could hear myself telling Kurt, oh, it seemed so long ago. 

“Not now,” I pleaded, grabbing her hand and stepping forward. “Please, not now. I need you, Santana. I need your help, I don’t know what to do.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Kurt’s jaw drop before he covered his mouth with his hand. “Don’t do this to us. Cooper needs you.” 

But it was all futile, I could see the steely resolve in her brown eyes. With a smile that I could almost call apologetic, Santana turned my hand up so that she could place a note in it, a note she’d folded like one of those fortune teller things we all made as kids. She glanced at Kurt and made a telephone with her hand, holding it up to her ear. He just looked at me as if he still couldn’t believe what was going on. 

Santana’s heels clicked across the parking lot. I looked down and unfolded her note. _Happy trails, hobbit_ , it said, with a tiny little abstract line sketch of a grinning Santana at the bottom of it. My laugh was half-choking, half a sob. Kurt looked over my shoulder and chuckled sadly. 

Santana’s car chose that moment to explode into an enormous fireball. For the second time in a day, Kurt and I were flung back by the force of an explosive blast, tumbling back onto the cement and grabbing for each other as we stared in shock. “Do you see her?” Kurt asked, eyes huge. “Did she get in the car?” 

But we’d both been looking at the note. We’d never seen her, and whatever was going on was clearly more dangerous now than ever, so we had to leave right now, and we would never know. 

*** 

Kurt found us a tea shop that seemed relatively quiet. The proprietor was alone that day, a slender, middle-aged bottle-redhead with an encyclopedic knowledge of tea. I let Kurt talk to her, both of them gesturing wildly in their enthusiasm for all things tea and coffee, while I paged through Cooper’s notebook, more slowly and less nervously than I had in the hotel room. 

The rain hadn’t done as much damage as I’d initially thought. I could still see all the drawings related to this con and the Prague con, all the mapped-out plans. Sketches of Kurt’s home, and of me by his hospital bed in Ohio. Drawings of Santana with her detonator and a gleeful smile on her face. Cooper’s memories of the boat cruises to Italy and to Mexico. 

And one of me, alone, sad-eyed but resolute in a shadowy living room – how I must have looked to him after I had punched him in the face. There were three words under me, rain splotched and blurry, but I could make them out. _An unwritten life_ , Cooper had scribbled there. Grief filled my throat and threatened to choke me. I closed my eyes and flipped to the next page. 

My fingers stumbled then, and my eyes flew open to see what I had found. There was a folded note there in the pages of Cooper’s book, I could see thick, angry black letters scribbled over it and knew it wasn’t his handwriting. I snatched it up right away, fingers shaking again. I had to stop and take deep breaths once again to steady myself, so that I wouldn’t rip the paper. As carefully as I could, I unfolded it and spread it out on the table next to my untouched cup of mint tea. 

“Blaine?” Kurt’s hand touched my shoulder, jostling me out of my shock. “What’s that?” 

“I don’t know.” I motioned for him to sit down, and I pushed the note across the table for him to see. “What does it say?” 

He glanced up to make sure his new friend was safely on the other side of her shop, wiping down tables. Reassured, he looked down at the note, a soft gasp escaping him almost immediately. “It’s a ransom note, just like I thought they might send. Where did you find this?” 

“In the notebook.” I pointed to where it had sat, still open to the pages I’d found the note tucked between. Santana winked up from the left hand page, making my heart hurt. I shook it off and looked at Kurt. “What do they want?” 

“Well, money.” His smile was rueful before he bent his head to the paper again. “It says they definitely have Cooper, they have an account they want the money wired to and a bank we’re supposed to do it from.” His eyes skipped over the words. “There’s a bank manager here we’re supposed to talk to...and then we’re supposed to meet them in a couple of hours. They provide a location.” 

I nodded, letting my fingers ping against the rim of my teacup. “Okay. Okay, so, fine. We can do that. We’ll wire the money from my account and we’ll go get Cooper.” 

Kurt bit his lip. “It’s a lot, Blaine. It’s not a problem for me, though, I’ve got it, I have all they’re asking for.” 

My stomach began to sink down to my feet when he said that. “How much exactly _are_ they asking for?” 

“One point seven five million,” Kurt replied, and in that moment I thought about leaving my brother to rot in some distant Russian Gulag. 

“I’ll kill him.” My fist pounded the table, sending mint tea sloshing out of my cup and over the white tablecloth. “I will absolutely kill him if that’s what this is.” 

The tea shop proprietor ran over, protesting in Russian, and Kurt met her with apologies and a large bundle of rubles. When she seemed placated, he hurried back to me, grabbing my hands so that I couldn’t cause any more damage. “What is it? What’s going on?” 

“He’s conning me! That’s what’s going on! My own brother!” I clenched my eyes shut, trying to get my temper under control. “He...Jesus Christ. He wanted to end this, _and_ he wanted your money.” Wrenching one of my hands from Kurt’s grip, I clutched my stomach. “I’m going to be sick.” 

Kurt gasped. “He’d do that? To you?” 

“Of course he would. To tell a story so perfect it fulfills itself, remember?” I wanted to scream, to cry, to throw up. “The perfect con. Goddamn it.” 

Kurt’s fingers closed around mine again, settling our entwined hands into my lap. “We don’t know it, Blaine. We don’t know for sure. He could be in real danger.” He took a deep breath, and when I opened my eyes again, he was calm and steady. “Take me to the bank. I won’t gamble with your brother’s life.” 

*** 

We had to rent a car –  What with Santana or some mysterious Russians blowing up our previous attempt at acquisition – and then it took Kurt thirty minutes to transfer the money, and then we were off to the location in the note, an enormous, ornate building standing alone by the sea that was grandiose enough to be the setting of Cooper’s dream con. I scoffed as we pulled up to it. “Christ.” 

Kurt put a hand over mine on the gearshift. “Want me to come in with you?” 

“No.” I sighed, trying to convince myself that this was really happening, that my brother wasn’t pulling a con on me. The answers all lay inside this elegant dump. “I’ll go in alone. Going in alone is…” I swallowed to cover the falter in my voice. “Very important.” 

He smiled at me, shaky but reassuring. Lifting my hand, he pressed a kiss to the back of it. “I’ll be here when you two come out.” 

Pulling my gun out, I offered him an equally shaky smile and I got out of the car. 

The building was boarded up, windows, doors, the lot. But someone had gone to the trouble of making a wooden gate for me to open up and go through, leaving behind the bright sunshine outside and entering into a very gloomy darkness. I stood in the doorway, letting my eyes adjust. 

It was a theater, maybe. Fake pillars and painted backdrops were everywhere, things that might have been props strewn across the floor. As I approached what certainly looked like a stage in the back of the room, I could see boxes in the wall for audience members, ornately carved and coated in dust. Con or not, this was definitely a building to satisfy all of my brother’s most wild and elaborate con fantasies. “Cooper?” 

Nothing, just the sound of my footsteps echoing through the cavernous, creepy chamber. I tried again. “Come out, Cooper. Game’s up.” 

Then – 

– _Light_! 

A spotlight went on in the balcony above my head, flashing down to blind me. Then it was past me, traveling to the stage, to where the dusty red curtains were ever so slightly parted. Orders were barked in Russian, and for a moment I wished I _had_ brought Kurt in with me, so I would have a fighting chance of knowing what the hell was going on. But whatever the order was, it didn’t appear to be to shoot me, and the light stayed steady on the stage, so I walked forward, up the stage steps and through the curtain to the even more dimly lit backstage. “Hello?” 

I saw him, then, as my eyes adjusted. Cooper, tied to a rickety wooden chair and draped in shadow. His head drooped, but at the sound of my voice he looked up, just as a light came on right over his head. And that let me see what they’d done to him, how they’d broken his nose and given him a black eye and transformed his too-perfect face into a punching bag. I ran forward. “Cooper!” 

“No! Blaine! Stop!” The words were choked out, and more lights came on, and I could see a man behind my brother, one arm wrapped around Cooper’s neck, and his other hand holding a gun to Cooper’s head. As I stood there, frightened out of my wits, Cooper struggled to breathe. “Blaine…” 

“Coop…” I didn’t know what to do. The man behind him was taller than either of us; in my terror he looked taller than both of us put together maybe. “Cooper?” 

“Did Kurt wire the money?” Cooper asked, all urgency and something I had never heard before – a terror to match my own. “Did he?” 

My throat was dry. “Yes.” 

That seemed to be some sort of cue for the man holding my brother in a choke hold. He let go of Cooper and, still pointing the gun, flipped open a cell phone and dialed a number. He mumbled in Russian and I stared at a bleeding cut down my brother’s high left cheekbone. “Coop...what the hell is going on?” 

“I’m sorry, Blaine.” Tears filled his eyes. “I’m so goddamn sorry.” 

“I don’t need sorry! I need to know what to do!” I took a step forward, just one, keeping my eye on the gorilla with the phone. He paid no attention to me. “Tell me what’s going on, what do I need to do?” 

Confusion was bright in Cooper’s eyes. “What do you need to do? Get the hell out of here, that’s what! Get Kurt and go!” 

“No! Not until you tell me the truth!” One hand was in my pocket, curled around my gun. I clicked the safety off. The other hand I held clenched in a fist, my fingernails clawing into the soft skin of my palm as I looked at him, wishing I had his ability to read people. “Is this real, Coop? Is this for real, or is this a con?” 

The shock that rippled across Cooper’s battered face was easy enough to read. “A con? You think this is a con?” 

Behind him, the gorilla grunted and gestured to me before tossing his phone at me. I unclenched my fist and caught it right before it hit me in the face. It was on, still live with whatever call he’d taken.

Cooper looked at me, inscrutable once again. “It’s real, Blaine.”

My shaking hand lifted the phone to my ear, and the person on the other end spoke before I could. “Hi, Blaine.”

 


	14. Chapter 14

That bright voice, soft and silky and full of regret I’d never heard from her. “Holly?”

“Yeah. Hi. Sorry about all this.”

As I stood, silent and shocked, Cooper started to talk again. “It’s real, Blaine,” he said again, shaking his head. “Those guys in the car were Holly’s guys. All very, very real Russians, not fake at all. This guy is her guy. She doublecrossed us.”

A delicate cough on the line. “Technically, I doublecrossed Cooper. The rest of you just got in the way, and I  _am_ sorry about that, Blaine. None of this is personal, not even the part with Cooper.”

“What is it?” I whispered.

“Well, it’s business, Blaine,” she replied, sounding surprised that she had to explain it to me. “It always has been. I needed money. Cooper needed help with a big con. But I’m ready to get out. Settle down, go legit.”

I laughed in disbelief.

“I would have thought you’d be the last person to laugh at  _that_.” She sighed in my ear. “I thought you of all people would understand...anyway. For that, I need money. I have grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle.”

“I’m sure,” I replied, and the words were as dry as my mouth.

She laughed, a bit sadly. “The book of hours is real. I needed a way to get it out of Prague that didn’t get my hands dirty, and Cooper provided that. Then I needed him to get it here so I could sell it, and you needed whatever it is that made him reach out to me…”

“But you’ve got the book now,” I said, angry tears stinging my eyes. “You got it, and you didn’t even have to pay real money for it! Now you can sell it, you don’t need to do this!”

“It’s not worth enough,” she sighed. “But if I sell the book  _and_ take Kurt’s ransom money  _and_ take your brother for everything he has, I’ll be able to get by after some smart investing.”

My mouth fell open with the shock of it. “You’re going to wipe out Cooper’s bank accounts?”

“Be happy I’ve found a way to avoid being greedy enough to come after yours, Blaine.” Her voice was full of melancholy and something that might have been guilt if I thought she were capable of feeling it. “He’ll be fine once he gives up the codes. Goodbye, Blaine.”

The line clicked dead, and I lowered the phone from my ear, staring at my brother. “Coop?”

“Run, Blaine,” he gritted out between his teeth. “Goddamn it, Blaine, run!”

And for the first time in my life, I unfroze when the moment most desperately called for it. Before I could think, my hand was out of my pocket and my gun pointed at the gorilla. “No!”

The gorilla pulled his gun out too and started firing. Cooper had somehow managed to get his hands untied and flung himself to the floor, covering his head. “Blaine, run, please! Run!”

But it was a firefight, me against the gorilla, my pitiful little pistol against his whatever it was. Cooper stayed on the floor as the bullets flew, and I dodged back behind a big piece of set backdrop, peeking out to exchange more shots with the gorilla. My hands didn’t fumble now as I reloaded from the tiny supply of bullets in my coat pocket. But I couldn’t hit the guy, he was too fast. I was lucky that I had good reflexes as well. One shot did wing through the sleeve of my jacket, leaving a good size hole to show me how he’d only just missed hitting my arm.

It went silent at last, dust flying in the narrow strips of sunlight creeping through the boards surrounding the building. I checked my pocket – sure enough, out of bullets. I waited a moment to see if the big guy would do anything, but there was nothing, no noise but our heavy breathing.

I crept out from behind my shelter, scanning the floor for Cooper. He was where I’d left him, still covering his head. At the sound of my footsteps, his head jerked up, his eyes wide. “Blaine! No! He’s got another – ”

A bullet grazed over my head, or where my head would have been if Cooper hadn’t lurched up and tackled me backwards, pushing me back towards the discarded set piece. More shots were fired, most of them missed, but one –

– one made my brother’s eyes open wide and fall against me with a gasp, and when I touched his right side, his shirt was soaked through and warm, and he hissed in pain.

We fell to the floor and the gunman ran past us. I caught a glimpse of his face as he went, and he was scared to death, and then he was gone, down the stairs and through the clutter and out the opened gateway.

I pushed Cooper off of me, gently, and got to my feet. “Oh, god.”

“It’s nothing.” But his smile was strained as he put a hand over the bullet wound in his side. “Pretty sure this is not how Holly meant for that to go down.” His eyes rolled back in his head and he trailed off, his breathing too heavy. “She’s gonna eat that guy for lunch for leaving…”

“Tell me that’s makeup,” I asked him, my voice unable to go louder than a harsh whisper. “Tell me it’s a cackle bladder. Tell me this is all a setup, and that you just pulled off the perfect con.”

He lay there on the floor at my feet. Still, too still, and too pale. His eyes opened wide and he began to gasp, twitching and shaking. I froze, unsure of what to do, of what was happening. It almost felt comforting to resort to my usual uselessness in the face of extreme terror.

At last, Cooper went still again, his eyes fluttering shut, and I dropped to my knees.

Which is when he opened his eyes and spat on the dirty stage floor. “You said it, not me,” he said, cheerful as ever as he rolled himself backwards, over his head and up to his feet in a smooth tumble. He stood there, covered in blood with his trademark grin and widespread arms, gloating at me as I knelt at his feet in shock. “I deserve a big wow for this, Squirt.”

“Wow,” was indeed all I could say as he pulled me to my feet. I grabbed him into my arms, holding tight to my anchor, my lifeline, my one and only brother. I didn’t even try to stop tears from rolling out of my eyes. “Jesus, you asshole.”

“That’s the kind of praise I like to hear.” He squeezed me tight and then pulled back, grabbing my face in his hands. “Okay, Blaine. You’re done here. Done with all of this. You’re going to leave here, right, and you’re never coming back. Drive to Helsinki and take the first plane out to wherever. Mumbai, Tokyo, Sydney, Rio. I don’t care.” He pulled out his phone and started texting. “If you need money, here’s my bank access codes. Take all that you need.”

I frowned. “But Holly…”

“I’ll take care of Holly.” He spat again. “Ugh, tastes like tinfoil. Listen, did Santana split?”

“Yeah. Car bomb.”

“Ah, a clean exit either way it went. Where’s Kurt?”

I gestured to the open doorway. “Outside, waiting.”

“Okay. Good.” He nodded. “Do like I said, get in that car and head for Finland. Make it like you’re on the run from vengeful mobsters, he’ll appreciate that, it’ll give some gravity to the whole thing.” Pulling me close, he squeezed the breath out of me. “Go on, get out of here, Blaine. Go have your life. You earned it.”

Something wasn’t sitting right, not quite. “What about you?”

“Me?” Cooper leaned down, picked up his hat in one hand and the chair he’d been sitting in with the other. He dragged the chair out to the stage and sat it smack in the middle, right in the spotlight puddle that still glared there. Plopping his hat on, he dropped into the chair and grinned up at me. “Well, I’ll see you when I see you.”

I shifted on my feet. “When?”

“Not anytime soon, I hope. You don’t need me hovering over you forever, Squirt.” He waved me off, shooing me down the stairs. “Besides, I’m never going to top this. Ever.”

I had to smile. “That’s true.”

As I tripped down the stairs and headed towards the door, his voice stopped me one last time. “Blaine.”

I turned, and he had the damn card deck in his hands again, shuffled and cut. There was a card facing me. The Queen of Hearts.

I met his grin with a grin of my own. “That’s the best card trick I’ve ever seen,” I told him, fixing in my mind forever the sight of him with the right card at last. “I wish you had a bigger audience.”

His smile drooped, just a little, just for a second. “You’re the only audience I ever needed, Squirt.”

My throat was full again. “I love you, Coop,” I managed to get out.

The last sight I had of my brother was him smiling, sitting in that chair and shuffling his cards. 

***

Kurt’s eyes were huge as I walked up to him. “You’re covered in blood.”

“Yep.”

“Are you okay?”

I stopped walking to consider this. “I think so.”

Kurt rolled his eyes. “I meant, you’re not shot? I heard gunshots.”

“Oh, no. I’m not shot.” I tugged at my shirt. “This is Cooper’s blood. Well, it’s blood, sort of, anyway.”

That just made Kurt’s eyes get bigger. “Should we help him?”

“He’s fine.” I trudged over and gave him a kiss, then slumped into the passenger seat of the car.

Kurt got in behind the wheel. “Are we waiting for him?”

I yawned. I was so, so tired. All the adrenaline from the gunfight was gone. “No. He said he’d catch up later. He’s got some talking to do with Holly.”

“Ah.” Kurt nodded as he started up the car. “This was all her then?”

“Yep.” I waved out the front window before leaning down on his shoulder. “Go to Helsinki…” But I was asleep before I could say anything else.

No Russians, no car bombs, the car ride went smoothly. Kurt let me sleep until we were just outside the Finnish border, pulling off the road and shaking me awake. “Blaine. Blaine? I think you should change clothes before we get to the border. The guards might think we’ve been engaged in illegal activities.” 

That made us both laugh. I roused myself to give him a kiss on the cheek. “You have a point,” I said, or began to say, before I got a good look at my shirt.

 _The problem with fake blood_ , I remembered saying to Cooper so many months and a lifetime ago, there in Jesse St. James' courtyard, amidst jacaranda and smoke,  _is that it never changes color when it dries._

Cooper’s handprint on my chest, the cuff of my shirt, everywhere he’d put his hands on me, the blood was stiff and dry...and brown.

My heart slammed to a stop in my chest, my fingers brushing over my shirt as I tried to process it, tried to understand and reject what I was seeing, what it meant.

I tried to stop my brain from forming that last picture of Cooper, my last sight of him in that chair, with his cards, waiting until I was gone to drop his facade of bravado and slump backwards. I tried not to see what I knew had happened, how he’d sat in that chair and thought about everything, and when the lights went out in his blue eyes, I knew he’d had a smile on his face.

A gasping, keening wail filled the car and it took a moment for me to realize it was me, the sound was coming from my mouth, stretched open wide to let out my grief and anger and horror. Kurt held me, could only hold me close as I howled, my tears soaking his shirtfront.

The car was too small to contain it all. I pushed away from Kurt and opened the car door, stumbling out into a field of goldenrod and collapsing to my knees, still emitting that siren-wail of grief. Kurt was right behind me, grabbing me and falling to the ground with me, muffling my cries in his shoulder. I felt his tears, too, hot through the shoulder of my jacket.

It seemed unfair that the sun should keep shining, the world keep turning, life marching on while I cried and my brother was out of this world that hadn’t been big enough to contain him.

When my eyes were dry and burning, when I couldn’t heave out another gasp, when I was almost numb, I pulled away and sat back in the grass, scrubbing tear tracks off of my face with the heels of my hands like a little kid. Kurt sat back too, heedless of the pollen and grass stains that would ruin his trousers. His face was sad as he reached out to cup my face with his hand. “He said something to me, once,” he murmured. “Cooper did, I mean. Back on the boat, way back when this all started and we were going to Italy.” He stopped and sniffled, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping his nose.

I could only look at him, my heart heavy. “Yeah?”

Kurt nodded, his breath coming in little hiccups until he held his breath and got them under control. He managed to fix on a wobbly smile as he looked at me. “He told me, ‘You know, Kurt, there’s no such thing as an unwritten life. Just a badly written one.’” At my gasp, he nodded again, tucking the handkerchief away so he could hold my face with both hands now. “I love you, Blaine. You know that, right?”

I did. I nodded, covering his left hand with mine, and I knew he did love me, for whatever crazy reason.

He inhaled, a deep breath all the way to his toes. “You know what we’re going to do now, Blaine?” he asked, stroking his thumbs over my cheekbones.

I shook my head and waited.

“We’re going to live,” Kurt said, eyes bright and blue and full of grief, but also hope. “We’re going to live like we’re telling the best story in the world.” He got to his feet, holding his hands out to mine. “Are you ready?”

As I let him pull me up to standing, I remembered that other thing Cooper had said, a long time ago, the thing I’d told Kurt on the ship the very first night.

That the perfect con was the one where everyone involved got just the thing they wanted.

A strange peace descended on me, anesthetizing my grief for the moment.

“Let’s go to Helsinki,” Kurt said, pulling me to the car and tucking me into my seat. He went to rummage in the trunk and came back with a fresh shirt and jacket for each of us. “Let’s go sit in saunas, let’s drink aquavit, let’s eat gravlax on rye bread and cloudberry tarts, let’s live like Cooper wanted us to do. Let’s do what we can to make tomorrow a wonderful day, okay?”

He dropped down behind the wheel, and I leaned over to cup the back of his neck in my hand, to pull him close so I could kiss him soft and sweet.

When he pulled away, I drank the sight of him in, soft and breathless and sad but happy, and even though my heart ached, I knew with him at my side, in time, it would ease. I knew that this is what Cooper had always wanted for me, even when I didn’t really know what I wanted.

“With you in it,” I said at last, lacing my fingers through his, “I can even make a wonderful life.”


End file.
